


Into the Abyss

by Saosmash



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Anders/Hawke UST, Anders/Hawke/Fenris prefic if you squint and tilt your head a little, Demonic Possession, Dragons, Identity Issues, Mage Hawke - Freeform, Merrill/Carver background, Plotty, Purple Hawke, Spiders, Spirits, Spoilers, Suicidal Ideation, The Fade, Warden Carver, did i mention the spirit possession?, giant icky spider monsters, polyHawke if you squint, purple ones, ridiculous jokes only sometimes, spirit possession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-11-07
Packaged: 2018-03-06 08:16:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 70,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3127538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saosmash/pseuds/Saosmash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trapped in the Fade, Hawke leaps headlong into an adventure. Outside the Fade, her friends will stop at nothing to try and rescue her. Well, almost nothing.</p>
<p>Set during and after Dragon Age: Inquisition. Watch for spoilers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> * Thanks to rozzingit and teztime for beta reading and generally making me write it.

It wasn't the Inquisitor's low voice, speaking decision, that Hawke heard echoing in her ears as the gap yawned before them. It was another voice, older, darker, out of memory. _Watch for that moment_ , the old woman's voice said, _and when it comes, do not hesitate to leap._

Hawke lifted her head. "Say goodbye to Varric for me," she said. Varric would have to do all the rest, poor bastard. As the others hurled themselves to safety, she lowered her head and charged through the smoky haze of green fog, staff swinging in wide swaths of alternating lightning and flame as she smashed into the disgusting arachnid mass. 

"Why is it always the Maker-damned spiders?" she asked as she drove the spike at the end of her staff through the many-eyed body of one of the filthy things. 

She didn't even notice the moment when the portals closed. It was grim work, and her energy should have been flagging. Each blast of power channeled through her seemed almost to come out of the thick air of the Fade, and she felt sweat and cold at once, her breath huffing as she worked, dodging past blows and dancing through the thickness of the mist. Fire sang from her staff, blasting across one of the glittering eyes and searing it into a minor explosion of yuck about which Hawke chose not to think.

"I will make all of this right," Hawke growled through her teeth, but she didn't even know how long she'd been fighting. 

Well, she'd been fighting her whole life, really. Whenever she wasn't hiding, she was fighting. Sometimes she was hiding and fighting, two tragic mistakes for the price of one. 

She should probably have been dead by now. She should probably have been wearied beyond belief, sucking the last of the forces she had at her command from her depths and preparing to pass out into the nothingness of an unconsciousness that would soon become death. There was a crack in her lightweight mage's armor, and she'd long since lost the stony force of false rock she'd been using to protect herself from the worst of the nonsense, since it hadn't been her own spell, but the gift of a potion brewed from Merrill and hoarded with her things before the siege of Adamant. She could taste her blood in her mouth, mingled with the sweat. Who even know where that cut came from. She didn't have time to figure it out.

At least she knew it wasn't spider blood. The blackish ichor splattered everywhere but it definitely didn't look like it would taste like human blood.

Hawke took a moment to be mildly relieved that she couldn't do blood magic by accident. "Ha!" she yelled as she spun and lanced out with another burst of fire from the staff. 

Some kind of claw had buried itself in her armor. The spider thing that had come with the claw was no longer attached. She wondered when she'd sliced it free. She wondered why there were no healing unguents and poultices when you needed them, and felt satisfaction in watching the fading crackle of flame eating into the ichorous cracks in the carapace before her. 

Another spider impaled on the end of her staff, she flung its corpse into the gaping maw of the monstrous spider-demon thing that was the nightmare, and felt herself smiling in the most delicious spite she'd felt all day as it screamed revulsion from being forced so physically to taste the corpse of its own minion. 

"What's a nightmare scared of?" she taunted it, leaping through the fog from one rock to the next as she swung her staff. Somehow she felt distanced from the pain, separate from it. There was only the fight. She was going to make this right. "Is it me?"

The voice of the huge and beastly thing seemed to come from all around her, from within the stones on which she leaped, from the depths of her bones, vibrating through her as it spoke. "This is a fight you cannot win," it said.

Hawke inhaled green fog and raised her arms, calling on the full force and fury of the tempest, calling black and midnight clouds to swirl through the nonair of the Fade itself to cast shrieking lightning and airy destruction over the monstrous thing, and crowed, "I've definitely never heard that one before!" as she leapt into the storm.

She didn't hesitate for a moment.

***

"You can't be serious," the Admiral said. She was sitting on a table, her knees spread wide in her high boots, thighs peeking warm and dark where the fabric fell between them, barely obscuring her undergarments. 

Fenris wasn't looking, but it wasn't a point of pride or anything. He was accustomed to Isabela. He was accustomed to Isabela's mild trousers allergy and her need to be on top of things, which ranged from whomever was her current sexual partner, to the power structure of her ship or her fleet, to, apparently, the table. 

"Varric will pay," Fenris suggested cajolingly. He even smiled, very slightly. Because it was funny.

"Varric isn't paying for anything." Isabela scowled at him from beneath the broad brim of her enormous admiral's hat and slouched backward on the table, her hands framed against it to either side of her hips. "I told you, no freebies. Of the many things sailors are touchy about, the thing they are most touchy about is their pay."

"I didn't tell you not to pay them," Fenris said. This was not an argument he was going to win, but it was also not an argument he needed to. Isabela would deliver her terms in good time, and, businesslike, he would agree to them. 

There was gold enough. The hunter's life had grown very lonely and cold these past few months, but Tevinter slavers were excellent prey. Not that he missed Merrill particularly. He did almost miss the dog. He'd traveled with the mabari hound, Merrill, and Carver Hawke for a solid two weeks getting him as far on the road to Weisshaupt as they could before it was time to turn back. Because Hawke asked, and he did what Hawke asked, even when she drove him crazy. Even when it involved traveling with Merrill and Carver Hawke and a very slobbery giant warrior beast across miles and miles of increasingly cold road.

At one point, he'd been convinced his toes were going to fall off. And of course, she hadn't even been there. 

"This is just something I have to do," Hawke said when she left. "Mage stuff. Don't worry. I'll be back."

"'Mage stuff'," he had growled at her, "means Anders stuff."

She hadn't disagreed. She'd only smiled. Which meant that whatever she'd gone to do, it was totally Anders stuff. The letters that had followed him had not been reassuring, except that instead of only being Anders stuff, it was also Varric stuff, in which he was not involved, because she was either keeping him safe, or doing something that he would hate, or both, although ... necessarily, it was probably both, since he hated when she did anything of the kind.

Fenris deeply disapproved of all of this. 

Isabela said, "You realize that the Storm Coast is basically a bloody war zone. I shall have to give them hazard pay. Hazard pay, Fenris. You are going to beggar me. I'm going to be crying alone in a tavern without two copper pieces to rub together and I expect you will laugh."

"I'm sure you won't be alone," Fenris said, cocking an eyebrow at her.

Which is when Isabela punched him. In the shoulder, so it probably hurt her more than it hurt him. She was wearing heavy leather gloves and he was wearing spiky armor of the kind he always wore.

"I only meant that if I were laughing, you clearly would not be alone," Fenris assured her.

"Mm-hmm," Isabela hummed skeptically. "Sweet thing. You know that I treasure your company, but it is not worth transport of ... how many did you say there were?"

"Fifty," Fenris said. "Mostly very healthy. Women and children."

"Ugh." Isabela pulled her admiral's hat down over her forehead, her lips pulling into a grimace of great distaste. "And you want me to run them where?"

"They were taken from Fereldan. If you think it will be more cost effective to find them a home somewhere in the Free Marches, I suppose they could be persuaded. There is only so much I can do," Fenris said.

"I think that's more words than I've heard you utter in a row in ages," Isabela remarked, "and in exchange for you being so informative, I will reduce my price by a sovereign per head." She leaned forward, framing her cheek against her hand, and raised her eyebrows at him from beneath the brim of her hat.

Fenris resisted the urge to knock the hat off of her head. It was kind of ridiculous. Instead, he gave her his very best polite expression. "So how much," he said.

Isabela suggested a price.

Fenris looked at her, sardonic.

Isabela looked back, innocent.

Fenris sighed. "Isabela," he said, "I am not part of this transaction."

Isabela said, "Spoilsport." She took her hat off her head, ran her fingers through her hair, and set it down on the table beside her. "I was prepared to offer you a sizeable discount, too." She flicked at one earring and then the other with the toss of her hair back from her shoulders, and then said, "I'll need to see the cargo, Fenris."

He felt his temper rising, because he knew Isabela and he knew what she was and who she was and what she'd done and what she'd do again -- and then there was that word, light on the tongue, airy and easy, cargo. 

She watched his struggle for long enough for her expression to go completely unreadable, and then she snapped at him, rolling her eyes, "Because I am not stuffing fifty people into my cargo hold without seeing what they'll need." 

She hopped down from the table and slapped him firmly on the behind. Fenris, expecting this, did not even do her the courtesy of jumping.

"Come on," Isabela said, turning to stride out of the musty tavern into the salty dockside air. "Show me. I know you're good for it. And my boys will enjoy a little excitement with their hazard pay."

Long-bladed weapon slung up and over his shoulder, Fenris followed on light-footed steps, and wondered when his next letter from Hawke would come, and if she would continue to pretend that whatever she was doing wasn't all Anders's fault.

Damn him. And damn Varric, too.

***

As Hawke leapt, her momentum seemed to carry her too far, as if in the Fade, gravity was not quite right, as if having a physical body here was not quite right, and for a moment it seemed like she was going to fly over the hideous spider thing. For a moment, she imagined herself a dragon about to sear it from the world with fire, wings stretching, neck arched--

She felt the rush of total conviction like a mixture of adrenaline and wine and triumph as she sailed through the air, and wondered if this was what could turn some of her nearest and dearest into total assholes. 

Golden light seemed to limn her staff, blazing outward from it, coating her arms and gleaming over her fingers as she slammed down onto the not-spider's body. Her whole body seemed to be caught in an aureate halo that she didn't recognize. Two bolts of lightning from the storm she had created sliced viciously into the beast, and the air stank of burning flesh, stark ichor, and ozone. The lightning avoided her, electric power surging, and somehow even as the screaming monster bucked and urged and tried to shake her from her perch, she drove the staff home to cave through the carapace. Ichor should not be able to fountain, but it did, and the smoldering remains echoed with curling tendrils of a golden light.

She was high on exhaustion and triumph and she called out, "I will make this right!" and in the midst of her exultation she was pretty sure her voice had an echo.

Then Hawke said, "Oh, shit."

Okay. That part didn't echo. She felt obscurely better about that. She stared at her hand and wondered if there was some kind of hallucinogenic properties of the green fog she'd been breathing for however long she'd been fighting that hideous thing.

What she'd thought was a corpse twitched beneath her.

She should have been out of juice. She felt drained, spent, like she was on the verge of falling over, but she reacted on instinct. Another blast of lightning shot from the fingertips of her light-limned hand and splattered the remains of the corpse beneath her. Smoke began to rise from it, and then, impossibly fast, it started to crumble.

Suddenly she was pitched forward into a rolling cloud of ash and dust, and she was falling. She closed her eyes tightly, tumbling and rolling over the impossible landscape and feeling every impact of the unreal world through her cracked and battered armor.

Until finally, she lay in a heap in the Fade with her eyes closed. 

Coughing and spitting blood, Hawke opened her eyes. She looked at her hand. The glow was gone.

"Oh, good," Hawke mumbled.

Before she had time to really wonder what happened to you if you passed out in the _fucking Fade_ , the darkness took her.

*** 

Anders was never really alone these days, or else, he was never really Anders. He couldn't quite decide which. 

It was a thought that made him angry and he couldn't understand the shape of his own anger, because so much of it so rapidly melted into blame and flew out of him in a river of invective and destruction and chaos. He hated, with everything that he was and, he was sure, everything he had ever been. Memory and understanding and personality all seemed to fuse together into this hot core at the center of himself, and it made him powerful, and it made him weak, and sometimes he could taste salt on his tongue and it was his first realization that he had that he had wept. 

But there were moments like these, when he'd just woken up, that he felt pretty sure that the person to be angry at wasn't the templars, not even the wrecked statue of Knight-Commander Meredith that screamed in silent, permanent agony where it stood sentinel over the chaos-eaten Kirkwall he'd left behind. 

It wasn't Hawke, even when he found himself screaming at her to take back her choice and kill him for what he had done because it would only be justice. 

It wasn't anyone who had caged him or trapped or brutalized him in his youth. Not really. For one thing, most of them were already dead. The worst of the templars had mostly died with the revolution. Along with so many others. 

It wasn't Justice. He couldn't hate Justice, at least, not the Justice that was. He had only been a spirit, to be corrupted by the mortal anger and despair that had gnawed beneath Anders's cavalier approach to the universe. He was not a figure of blame. Just of tragedy.

The only person to be angry at was Anders.

But he could feel the rage rising to consume him again anyway even as he stumbled to his feet, breaking the makeshift campsite. Rain was threatening again, although the storm had not yet broken. He'd spent so much of his life on the run that this was not really any different. The bedroll rolled, it became a backpack in which he stuffed his meager supplies. He was on the road again in a few minutes. 

He walked through the trees. The distant towers of Ostwick shimmered in the mist in the distance but it was an illusion of closeness that would never really come to be. He hated them for being whole, for being a bastion of civilization, for being far away, maybe just on general principles. There was a small bastion of rebel mages living in and working out of Ostwick that he needed to reach, because so many of the mages had been swallowed up by Tevinter in Fereldan, and there were so few who were left who had not been slaughtered by the war he'd started. He needed to bring them together. Sometimes they heralded him as an anarchist hero who had done the only thing that could possibly be done, had forced the world to choose a side, and he had to try to remember how to smile and raise his glass to their youth and vehemence with the ghosts of a thousand innocents choking him.

He owed it to the mages to keep going. He had done so much, had gone so far, that to stop now and let his own death come would do nothing but dishonor the sacrifices that he had made. 

It occurred to Anders, not for the first time, that Hawke had a very cruel sense of justice.

Hoofbeats were pounding up the road ahead. He flattened himself against the tree and closed his eyes as he listened, waiting to see if it was a templar patrol, if it was more rebel mages, if it was bandits or refugees -- no, not likely, not on a horse. He waited with his heart in his throat.

It was just a messenger.

The horse slowed and Anders watched in consternation as the messenger dismounted and began poking around the campsite. How could anyone have known where he was? More to the point, why was he alive if anyone had known where he was? But the elf sucked in her cheeks, looked up into the dark clouds, and walked forward into the trees after him. She wore mostly black but her hauberk was sewn with a sigil that looked like a dark bird in flight.

Oh.

Her.

Anders stepped out from the trees, his staff lifted in a gesture of defense, his hand turned outward beside it. "If you're here to assassinate me, you should really be more subtle," he said. Smiling came easier when it was an act of sarcasm, somehow. 

She tossed a leather satchel to him. "If I were here to assassinate you," she said with an airy, Starkhaven lilt, "you'd already be dead." 

She didn't wait for a reply message; instead, she turned and walked back to her horse.

"Who sent you?" Anders said, not expecting an answer.

"Now there's a silly question," said the elf, and she was off at a gallop.

But the handwriting of the missive was Varric's. Anders stared at it in total mystification because it didn't seem like facts. It didn't seem like reality. And when it struck him that it was reality, that it was real and true and that there was nothing he could do about it, he felt a rage summoned up from inside him like nothing he had ever felt before. 

Because there was no possible manifest injustice to this universe worse than this one.

He could hear himself screaming and it was the last thing that he was aware of for a long time. When he came to his senses again, he stood in a circle of absolute destruction. He had wrecked every tree and parts of the road and broken, smoking fragments of stone within a notable radius of himself. 

Fear froze his heart, a lance of panic totally out of proportion to every other murder that he had wreaked upon the world, and he ran ahead after the messenger, chasing her hoofbeats as fast as he had ever run in his life. 

When he found no death upon the road ahead and was sure she had escaped, he fell to his knees in the dirt and panted until the weeping started, and then he wept until he couldn't breathe, fingers twisting in his hair as he tried to, possibly, pull it out by the roots.

If the universe had a proper sense of drama, it would have started to rain, but it didn't. Anders would have to tell Varric. 

Life was just not fair. 

Anders looked back over his shoulder, blearily, at the smoking ruin he had made of the mostly pristine forest. It was too clear he had been here. He had to keep going; he had to keep on, living without Hawke, living with injustice. 

He turned and fled into the forest. He was going to have to take a much, much longer route to Ostwick now.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More thanks to my darling betas, teztime and rozzingit.

Light seemed to beat against her closed eyelids, like red and vicious flares of brightness pounding in time to the throb of her head. It wasn't just her head, either. Hawke felt as though there was no part of her body did not hurt. 

"Ohh," she groaned, "I know I'm going to regret this," and after drawing a long breath through which to fortify herself, she opened her eyes.

She was right. She immediately regretted it.

Unfortunately, passing out in the Fade did not mean immediately waking up again in reality. Luckily, because she had vanquished the nightmare, it did not apparently mean her death, either. Assuming, of course, that she wasn't dead. Didn't souls pass through the Fade when they died, on their way to the Maker's side?

The Black City loomed high above in the greenish sky, terrible and huge and difficult to look directly at. It formed the primeval shape of nightmares, a shadow cloaking everything that had ever gone before. Hawke decided not to look at it. She closed her eyes again.

She probably wasn't dead. If she was a soul walking through the Fade on the way to the Maker's side, she probably wouldn't feel this much like she'd been sat on by a dragon. 

No. Rolled over on by a dragon trying to scratch its back.

At least she wasn't hungry. In fact, she felt a little nauseated. In fact, this post-battle fatigued awfulness reminded her of a really nasty hangover. A particular one. It had been a two day drunk after she'd gotten Anders out of the city. She'd blamed Isabela at the time, but it was very clear whose fault it actually had been.

"Blast," Hawke muttered. She pitched herself over onto her shoulder, rolling onto her side, and groaned despite herself at the creak of her ribs. Something had smashed them but good. 

But hey, she'd killed the nightmare.

Opening her eyes again, Hawke looked around the Fade. There was no more shimmering rift light, but on the plus side, the fog seemed to have floated away along with the murky ash of the thing she had destroyed. Spirits did not precisely _die_ in the Fade, but robbed of their corporeal form, it could be centuries before a nightmare again rose to haunt the minds and memories of humanity, and even then, when it did, it would no longer be the creeping fingers of the right hand of an ugly bastard darkspawn priest crying rage to eternity about the emptiness of heaven, so Hawke was pretty happy to call that a win.

Running her hand through the short, dark, spiky fluff of her hair, she finally managed to push herself up into a sitting position despite the twinges and complaints reported from every corner of her body, and she was pretty happy to call that a win, too.

A vein of lyrium shimmered blue and inviting above her to the left. Rising to her knees, she forced herself the rest of the way standing with a stagger. 

Upright, she ghosted fingertips along what seemed to be a lyrium vein, trying to will some of the power it held into something to accelerate the healing of her battered body. Unfortunately, it was ghost lyrium. Fade lyrium. Fade power. 

And this was her real body. Her fingers buzzed and tickled for a moment, gooseflesh rising along her skin beneath her armor, but it didn't really do anything.

She wasn't sure what this place was. It seemed to echo and refract, stony paths twisting and winding in every possible direction, breaking off to float islanded and distended in chasms of nothing and then over a shimmering ocean of off-color water that seemed to stretch unimaginably far. It had been creepy walking here in company with the Warden and Varric and his new best pal and his favorite Chantry stalker. It was even creepier walking here alone.

Her step was unconscionably slow. She felt a little as though each pace dragged one foot behind the other, sending unpleasant shocks of pain through her, some of which seemed uncomfortably located somewhere in her spine, between her shoulderblades. 

The air seemed like concentrated gloom, with angry crags of rock frozen in the midst of shaking fists at the Black City impossibly high above. On she walked, step after stiff step, and tried to will the pain gone by sheer force of stubbornness.

"I bet Aveline could do it," she said to one of the rocks.

It didn't answer. 

Hawke decided to be relieved.

***

This wasn't the first time that Fenris had been aboard Isabela's ship in the past few months, although it was the first time he had been aboard Isabela's ship without any of the others. It was massive, a strong-built frigate with a prow built like a deadly lance. Her sails were sheets of black, three masts thrusting powerfully into the starlit sky. She sat waiting, quivering gently in the moonlight as the water of a restless tide lapped at her hull.

There was something about the heavy bulk of the ship that had surprised Fenris greatly when he first saw it. He was expecting Isabela to sail something light and fleet, a cutter to slice through waves on the wind. This was a ship that reminded him, somehow, of a bronto about to charge. Something huge and hot-tempered and ready to ram its head into whatever came its way.

He didn't tell her, but he loved how angry it looked. He suspected that she had already guessed.

Below decks, quarters weren't cramped now, but sure as hell would be when it had been stuffed full of escaped slaves. Isabela looked uncommonly grim as she walked through the empty cargo hold, testing ropes and checking hauling points and knocking against the curving wall with one fist. Each stride took casual ownership of the space. 

Fenris felt a pang of envy for her ability to imbue so transitory a space as a ship with so powerful a sense of being where she belonged.

"The sailors use hammocks, but your landbound friends are going to have a deal of a time down here if we hit rough waters," Isabela said. "Which we will. They don't call it the Storm Coast for nothing. I don't suppose any of them know how to handle themselves aboard?"

Fenris spread his hands. He had no way to know. "Some of the children have proven quick to learn."

He hadn't been able to keep the least healthy of his charges alive. He had started with more than fifty. Slavers did not generally take those who were not healthy, but those who screamed defiance could be broken to provide an example to those who merely looked resentful. It generally protected the investment of the slaver company in question, not to mention slaking the bloodlust of the worst of their hirelings. 

In Tevinter, slavery was simply a fact of life. To slaves, it was frequently not even questioned. For such a slave as he had been, with no memory left to him of ever not being a slave, freedom had been such a hard won thing. Sometimes he still caught behaviors in himself that felt weirdly like deference. After so many years, there were still times, when he was not actively slicing his blade through the throats of those who would take foreign children against their will and sell them for bright Tevinter gold, that he repulsed himself.

Outside of Tevinter, where slavers preyed on the war zone of a bloody Thedas wrecked by mages run riot, new meat needed to be taught a lesson. It had been in the midst of such a lesson that Fenris had come upon the caravan, and so he had leaped to the attack. He'd meant to take the time to make a plan. But the sight of it had sent his blood hot instead of cold. He was lucky to be alive. He was lucky so many of the slaves _had_ been healthy. But not all of them had survived.

He would leave whose conscience those deaths belonged on for another time. He was doing what he could.

"You're breaking my heart, Fenris." Isabela stood, hands athwart her hips, and frowned at him. "All right. We'll make do. I'll get Suiver and Arklin to jury rig something down here ... but we're not going to be able to sail before tomorrow night."

"Not during the day?" Fenris glanced above him toward the hatch door that had led down here, and the starlight that peeked down at him from above.

"With a shipload of stolen cargo?" Isabela laughed as she swung forward on one of the ropes, letting it bear most of her weight as she leaned toward him on her toes, eyebrows up and brown eyes bright in the dark. "Please," she cooed at him. "You're such an amateur. It's adorable." 

"I'm not feeling particularly adorable," Fenris said, glowering at her. There was that cargo word again. 

Isabela swung loose her rope and slid up against him, all lush curves in very close quarters, and laid her hand lightly across his cheek, her thumb sliding beneath his chin, tracking the mark of his lyrium tattoos. "You're especially charming when you scowl like that. You know how irresistible I find it."

Fenris didn't balk at her approach. He held himself very still. For a moment, he didn't even remember to breathe.

Isabela chortled at him and slid the rest of the way past him through the hold, toward the ladder. "What am I going to do with you, sweet thing?"

"Exasperate me to death, I suppose," Fenris answered, as lightly as he could. He ignored the thready hammer of his heartbeat, and blew out his breath when her back was turned, eyebrows rising and falling in the dark. 

"Not before I earn my keep." Isabela winked at him over her shoulder and then began climbing her rope ladder back to the deck. 

He started after her, although he found himself uncommonly and aggravatingly flustered when she called brightly, "I hope you enjoy the view."

Damn Isabela, too.

***

Hawke was pretty sure she was lost, but just as sure she wasn't going in circles. She wasn't sure how long she'd been walking, but nothing looked familiar anymore. Well ... except that it all looked like the Fade. And it was all creepy.

Maybe it had been hours.

Hawke stared at a statue that looked uncommonly like Anders for a long moment, waiting for it to resolve into something else. Perhaps this was just a statue to rebellion. Perhaps her eye merely had only one possible translation for idiotic defiance.

She used his upraised staff as a support, bracing her hand on him as she walked on by.

"That's as close as you've been to supportive in years," Hawke told the statue of Anders over her shoulder. It wasn't fair, but then, he wasn't here to hear it, and she wasn't in the mood to be fair. "Now, if you actually _were_ here, maybe you could do something about how much I _hurt_..."

The statue didn't say anything. She pretended she had hurt its feelings, and briefly entertained herself by imagining Anders's stone features looking sad and remorseful instead of fiercely defiant. Both expressions were entirely too easy to visualize. Hawke decided this wasn't any fun anymore.

She wasn't sure where she was going, besides forwards. Some damn fool instinct told her to keep walking because that was the only way she'd ever get anywhere. 

She came to the end of a stone path that cut itself off in a high, stark precipice. Far below, the water of a false sea rippled and crashed against the rocks, sending spray in greenish-white gouts. The wind pulled at the water below, whistling and whispering in the heavy air around the precipice.

Somehow, Hawke knew that the whispers on the wind were words. It was an itch at the back of her mind, a shadow on the borders of perception, whispers lost and far away. It was a lonely breeze. For some reason, as she stood on the precipice and listened to what she could not make out, she remembered saying good night to someone far away as she curled beneath the covers of an empty bed, her fingers tracing the cool emptiness of the sheets beside her.

But here in the Fade, her mabari didn't suddenly swarm up beside her like a solid half ton of appallingly snuggly and reeking war dog trying to make her feel better. 

She was alone. 

Nowhere was there anything that looked like a portal, or a rift, or even a shortcut. The false world around her seemed to stretch on forever. Maybe she would walk forever, trapped in a dream world, unable to ever wake. She tried to pretend herself that she wasn't starting to get more thirsty than her solitary half of a canteen of water was going to provide for.

"Oh, well," Hawke said philosophically to nobody in particular. "At least we didn't break the world or anything. This time."

"No," someone's voice said behind her. "Not this time."

Which was about when she leaped out of her skin.

***

Anders had managed to get himself completely lost.

The forest loomed around him like an oppressive tangle of branches as he got deeper into it, and the slope of the path climbed subtly upward, just enough to make going slow and difficult. The rain came, and footing became treacherous. The trees offered little support, bark slick under the pounding rain. 

When the thunder began to roll in the distance, he had no idea why, but the storm brought Hawke back to his thoughts, and he was suddenly furious again, as if his anger was a hand closing around himself and squeezing tight until he couldn't breathe. His thoughts vanished in a hot streak of lightning.

He could still see gossamer cracks of glowing light fading on his skin when he blinked his eyes again. He was further uphill, and there were smoking, crackling remnants of flames burning in a swath behind him. He felt wet trickling on his cheeks and at first thought it was more tears until he glanced at his fingers and saw them wet with his own blood.

Anders sat down on the immense root of an ancient tree. Some of its branches had been burned away in his ... little episode, but the tree was huge and massive and it had weathered worse than a mage having a tantrum at its foot. He set his back against it, and then let his head fall back against the wet bark, and stared overhead into the intermittent fall of water. 

He wasn't sure how long he sat there; this time, it wasn't because he blacked out from impotent fury and let something else take him, but because he was spent in grief and self-pity and there was nothing left but a blankness that lasted for a long time.

The storm spent itself out while Anders was sitting there. When the rain petered off to a drizzle and then died, he was sitting in the total dark of a forest evening, trying to see through the leaves to find star or moon. He summoned a green glowy hum of fire around his fingers without thinking about it, and caught up a branch to will the ghostlight onto a torch. 

Now he had light. It was a pale, pallid light in the deep shadow of night, and he no longer had any idea where he was. 

The Veil was thin here. It wasn't usually so easy to summon veilfire. Anders hoped the Veil wasn't thin here because of something he'd just done. Who knew what kind of power an abomination like him could summon up in a blind rage? 

He tried to approach the anger sideways, but the wound was too raw, and he could feel himself tremble as he focused on it. He couldn't deal with this. It wasn't just loss. It was an ugly cocktail of loss and appalling selfishness and how much time and energy and effort he kept spending on hating himself. It was amazing how self-centered an act self-loathing was. Anders was sick of himself, and unfortunately, there was nobody else around here to be sick of.

"You warned me," Anders told Hawke, who wasn't there. "You told me not to go alone. You told me this would happen. What did you _see_ , Hawke?"

She hadn't told him _this_ would happen. She hadn't the prescience to predict her own death. But she'd told him she'd seen Justice take him over, wipe him clean, start over. He'd been too angry to listen. He was always too angry to listen. But now that she was gone, the crisp crack of her, "Damn it, Anders, could you just stop for two seconds and pay attention to something besides your own pain?" seemed to splash across his memory like a bucket of ice water.

There was no one to see what happened outside of himself, and he was not a very good witness as far as what was happening inside himself. 

Anders stared at the veilfire. He was too exhausted to sleep. He started walking again, but this time, he felt his feet wandering toward where the Veil was thinnest. He breathed deep of the mossy air, tasting ozone on his tongue, and finally reached a point where his shimmering torch seemed to reflect off something that wasn't there, calling a dim echo between the branches of a particularly ugly old tree.

It wasn't the first time he'd thought about summoning a demon and letting it kill him, putting the world out of his own misery, but even now, even after everything, even after Hawke, his grip on his life was too strong. Years ago, he'd been fond of that cowardice. Proud of it. He wondered what had happened to _that_ Anders. 

"Ironically, I think I killed him," Anders told the torch. He raised it, watching the light reflect off nothing that was there, and closed his eyes. Part of him reached for the Fade, hungered for it, needed it. Part of him cringed away from it. The ambivalence seemed stronger than usual. He felt his brow knit.

Unfortunately, there was no longer any Justice sufficiently separate from Anders inside himself to ask what that meant. He only had the confused muddle of emotions to reckon with. He squelched thoughtfully in the mud before the weak point in the Veil.

He knew a flame spell; he cast it with sufficient weakness to do little more than glow and heat the ground until it was dry enough to sit on. Then he sat before it, extinguished his veilfire, and closed his eyes. 

There was little more dangerous than resting in a place where the Veil was weak. He'd wake to demons, to black shades and giant spiders. He'd wake to the fight of his life.

But first he'd dream. If you had courage enough to call the Fade at a place like this where the Veil was weak, there was a chance you'd dream true. If, of course, nightmares didn't eat you from the inside out. 

And somehow, the creeping sensation that was something inside him trying to rip its way free and hurl itself at the Veil, _somehow_ it told him that here was something he needed to know.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to my darling betas, teztime and rozzingit, one for making me clean up my prose and the other for making sure I had enough jokes. <3

The really weird part was that when Hawke turned around, there was no one there. She was pretty certain she had not imagined the voice, because imagination did not generally supply such unfamiliar tone and timbre, and the rumbling depth and quality of the voice suggested someone had been there, using their voice to speak words that were carried on the air.

Of course, this was the Fade, so that wasn't really air. Perhaps it also wasn't really a voice. If she didn't know this was her physical body, there would be a school of thought that allowed her to believe none of this was really happening.

"Um," Hawke said, testingly. "Who's there?"

No one said anything. She turned in a slow circle, examining the path. Rock seemed to shift a little before her, out of the corner of her eye, but when she looked directly at it, it held still.

Then, because she was pretty certain that the spirit of Divine Justinia (or whatever it was) had died protecting them, and because she was pretty certain that the spirit of Divine Justinia had sounded much more traditionally and biologically _female_ than the voice she'd just heard, she said, "Your ... holiness? Is that you? Being holy?"

This time the voice definitely answered her because it said, "No."

She tried to orient on the sound. Instead, a faint vibration seemed to buzz against her skin, as if it was rising out of nothing, humming out of the air, to coalesce around the long spoked length of her staff. Golden light began to shimmer around her weapon again. As she watched, it spread in flowing wings like a dragon unfurling to catch a gust of wind. 

Hawke resisted the immediate urge to fling her staff away like there was a mysterious ethereal dragon hatching out of it and held herself still, instead. She breathed deep, forcing herself to relax, preparing herself to summon the magical energies within and around her for what might about to be a fight. It was kind of nice, in a paradoxical way. Everything about this was completely weird, except getting ready to fight. That was second nature. Even as her pulse sped and she could almost feel her reflexes sharpening with the adrenal thrill of preparation, she felt the pain recede and the world shrink to the height of this precipice. None of the rest of it mattered.

But the shimmery light that shaped itself as it left her staff diffused from its semi-corporeal form into something broader, a glowing cloud of gold that brought to mind the last moments of her battle with the nightmare, and slowly, Hawke lowered the weapon she'd raised. 

"Who ... _are_ you?" she asked it, cautiously.

The golden light wavered. It shifted, and shimmered, and then, eerily, Hawke found herself looking at her own reflection echoed in painted lines of gold, an image of herself in a dozen shades, all of which gleamed in brilliance.

"I will make this right," said the voice. With her face, but not her voice.

Okay. That was definitely weird.

"What are you making right?" Hawke asked. "I mean, because I'm going to say you saying that with my face is making me feel a little like something's wrong."

The spectre paused, tilting its head -- her head? -- for a moment as it studied her. Then it said, "I am what makes wrongs right. I am the turn of the page. I am the new beginning. I am error redeemed in action."

"A spirit?" Hawke asked.

The spectre nodded.

"With my face," Hawke said, by her tone ensuring that the spirit would know she was just checking.

The spectre shimmered, shifted, reshaped itself. It became something else. A stranger; someone Hawke didn't know. She felt some invisible hackles at the back of her neck beginning to lie down despite herself. The sense that she was about to be replaced by a glowing gold version of her that spoke drama faded to a dull niggling at the back of her head instead of a rising tension to make her jaw ache.

You know, more than it already did.

"Okay then," Hawke said, resettling her weight on her heels and setting the base of her staff lightly against the stony ground. "Did you help me, before?"

The spirit said, "Your action called to me, and so it was answered. You sought to redress a wrong and it was done. To fall in so doing might have been right. Yet you called; so I answered."

Hawke felt something strange and cold in the pit of her stomach. She looked at the spirit, at the unfamiliar lines of its golden face, at the impossible depth of its palely golden eyes. Carefully, she asked, "Do you have a name, spirit?"

"Men call spirits by many names, some after sin, others virtue." The spirit did not seem pleased by the question. "We are not captured by your names. We are what we are."

"Oh, I know you don't seem to be a demon. Demons aren't usually even remotely subtle. It's all rah rah, pride, or rah rah, look at my tits. Don't even worry about that," Hawke said quickly, her eyes skipping rapidly around the Fade as if checking for other spirits that might overhear them -- as if she'd see them anyway. "But just between you and me. You do have a name, don't you?"

"Yes," said the spirit, after a long pause.

"I bet I've guessed what it is," Hawke told it.

The spirit looked at her in apparent confusion. How could it look so innocent? So _lost_? 

"Justice," she said.

"Yes," said the spirit, finally, after a long silence.

To its apparent _deep_ confusion, Hawke said, "Oh, _fuck_."

***

It was dark, and even darker than night usually was, as the rain pattered down on him from high above. The dawn was coming soon, or it should have. With the momentum of their passing, the raindrops fell irregularly, splattering his face, his hair, his armor. Somehow the biggest gouts of wet came when he least expected, and there was a strange mix of cold, fresh water and salt with every breath.

"You can go below, you know. You don't have to stay up here all the time." Isabela seemed, if anything, more at home than before. At sea, the roll of her walk shifted with the deck, as if she felt the ship beneath her as much an extension of herself as the hilts of her daggers. 

"It's a little cramped," Fenris said with a low chuckle warming his voice. He turned, leaning his body backward against the rail. 

The ship cut through the black water, running ahead of the wind with surprising speed for something that looked as huge and, well, _bronto-like_ as this ship did. 

"Aw, but they love you down there, hero." Isabela smiled at him, something that he more heard than saw in the gloom. 

"Ha," Fenris said, with an upward flick of his eyes as he folded his arms over his chest.

"I'd think you'd be used to the adulation by now, sweet thing," Isabela teased him. She didn't bother with a sly glance in the dark. 

Fenris gave her a look even though she couldn't see him. He was pretty sure she knew it was happening. He turned his head, looking eastward across the wide swath of sea. There was no land to be seen anywhere. They'd been making excellent time, and there was no sign of pursuit, or even of any other ships. 

Below decks, there _was_ adulation. Restless children and relieved adults; young men and women with the light of fierce vengeance in their eyes to warm the battered edges of his spirit, just when he felt like he was fighting all his battles alone . . . but for now, it was mostly a lot of people huddled together in the dark for warmth and comfort while they rushed for their freedom in a way over which they had no control.

No matter how they meant their glances, uncertain or relieved or the longing looks he pretended not to notice, it just was not a room he chose to spend more time in than strictly necessary.

Besides. He'd never really had the hang of the _hero_ thing, unlike some people. 

"You aren't the only one who misses her, you know," Isabela told him with a laugh on her breath. "You needn't brood so much."

"I'm not brooding," Fenris said.

"You're always brooding," Isabela dismissed this protest with her usual alacrity.

"I'm not brooding any more than usual," Fenris suggested.

Isabela pressed her lips together as her nostrils flared with a snort, and she said, meaningly: "Hmm." Then she turned and walked past him toward the upper deck on long strides. "Rain's going to get worse before it gets better. You should really get under cover."

"Oh?" Fenris said, cocking an eyebrow she couldn't see as he turned to watch her move toward the only lantern light to gleam across the wet planks of the deck. "What about you?"

"Oh, you know me," Isabela answered with a glance over her shoulder at him, tipping her admiral's hat down over her forehead. "I enjoy getting wet."

Fenris sighed. Of course she did. 

***

"So what you're saying is, you _can't_ get a message to Anders," Hawke said.

She was sitting on the ground, her legs folded beneath her, her staff slung across her lap. Her shoulders were set against a high stone arch behind her that looked like it belonged to some other crumbling ruin, one far from here both physically and whatever else the Fade was. Astrally. Spiritually. Whatever.

The spirit sat before her, mimicking her body language if no longer mimicking her body. It watched her with a particularly quizzical expression on its face. It was obscurely nice to be able to read the expressions of something so inherently alien as a spirit. 

"No," the spirit said. "I am not a carrier of messages and I do not know what Anders is."

Hawke scrubbed her face with one hand. "Me either," she said. 

The spirit said, "Then--"

"Look, he's a mage, like me, only not in the Fade, but he's got a spirit of justice inside him," Hawke explained. "So I thought--"

The spirit looked at her.

"Yes, all right, I know there's got to be more than one spirit of justice in the entire Fade," Hawke grumped at it. "It was just a -- I mean, it wasn't one of your cousins or anything? Distant relation? Step uncle, twice removed?"

The spirit said, "What?" which she supposed was only fair.

"Never mind," Hawke sighed, and knuckled at her eyes, trying to scrub away some of the exhaustion that was weighing her down, pinning her to this stone arch.

"A spirit does not do this thing that you describe," the spirit told her in tones of disapproval.

"It's complicated," Hawke said glumly. 

"To risk corruption in this way is to risk becoming--" the spirit began.

Hawke interrupted, "Yes, yes, I know, but it wasn't my idea and by the time I told him he shouldn't have done it, it was way too late to do anything about it." She hit her head backward against the rocks and looked up into the false sky, watching the distant shadow of the Black City high above.

"There is always something to be done," Justice intoned with great weight in its deep voice. "There is always a way to right the wrong."

Hawke opened her eyes and looked at it.

"It is not the easy path. It is hard. It is unyielding. But it is the right path. It is the path that leads to a new beginning. The path that makes things right."

"So what _is_ it?" Hawke demanded.

The spirit of Justice did not really shrug, possibly because that was not a thing that spirits do. Like possessing people. It only said: "Find out."

Hawke let her eyes close again as she let her head fall back against the crumbling stone. She answered it, "Ugh."

Spirits probably didn't make generalized noises of disgust, either.

"There is a path," said Justice.

"A hard, unyielding path?" Hawke prompted, without opening her eyes.

"Yes."

"Do spirits also not do senses of humor?" Hawke asked next. "Because I feel like that explains a lot about the past few years."

Justice didn't answer.

"Right," Hawke said. She drew a deep breath, scrunching her eyes shut as she tried to fortify herself. "There's a bargain coming, isn't there?"

"A bargain?" said the spirit, again with that sound of distaste in its voice.

Hawke asked, "Will you show me the path?" 

And somehow, she knew what the spirit would say. She knew what the words would be. She could almost have spoken them with Justice, before they escaped the golden mouth.

"Will you make this right?" 

***

The dream was strange. 

Anders did not usually remember his dreams, though he was certain he had them. He had a vague idea that the part of him that was Justice did not so much wall him off from the Fade like he was Tranquil as ... filter it. When part of you was the Fade, and walked always in the Fade, maybe the avenues that made it real for others made it a little unreal for you.

In the dream, places and people blended together, melting into a weird morass of memory and thought. The Blackmarsh. Darktown. Vigil's Keep. The Circle at Lake Calenhad, so familiar and homey and altogether _wrong_ up until the point where it detonated around him in a screaming mass of flame and shrapnel.

So much for dreaming true where the Veil was weak.

Yet -- there _was_ something.

When Anders woke, fragments of dream clung to his mind, and for once, waking, he felt grief whole and entire. Anger was lost to him. For a moment, kneeling in a world cloaked in the grey before dawn, he mourned.

He mourned for Justice, the Justice that was, a spirit who walked the world to learn and grow as spirits could not in the Fade, a spirit who exhorted him to rise up against oppression when all he wanted to do was run and hide.

He mourned for innocents, dead in his wake. He mourned for the wreckage of the Chantry he had destroyed, those whose only crime was not doing enough, not being enough, not _acting_ , when every fiber of his being had seemed to demand action, action, action.

He mourned for mages, lost in a war for freedom that seemed, at times, unwinnable. 

He didn't mourn for templars, because even at his most rational, he couldn't quite bring himself to forgive the fallible humanity at the heart of the oppressive power structure that had defined his life, and his murders.

Most of all he mourned for Hawke, because in his dream, he had heard her voice, and it had come to him as clear as life.

Anders breathed deep of the forest air and found, for the first time in a long time, half-consciously, he had offered the first words of a prayer for the dead, and it had been so long since he had regarded the Chantry as anything more than a yoke, he was surprised to find it was a reflex that even existed.

Sitting back on his heels, he looked up. The grey was beginning to turn a brilliant orange, and he thought he could see a fringe of purple-green light shading between the trees.

Sunrise.

The light shimmered unreal and strange across the place in the air where the Veil was thin. In the waking light of a clear day begun, he heard Hawke's voice again.

All she said was, "... Yes."

Anders opened his eyes wide. He didn't even realize that he was staring toward the sun. 

Suddenly he was on his feet, so alive and possessed with the need for action, action, _action_ , that he had charged ahead several steps before he realized he needed to go back for his staff. 

"Yes!" he shouted at the top of his voice, and for the first time in months he heard himself laughing like a madman, gripping his staff aloft as he crashed through the trees at speed. He didn't need to find Ostwick. He needed to find the Waking Sea. He needed to find the others.

"Oh, damn you, Hawke!" he cried out, next, breathless with, for once, not rage, but joy. 

It was exasperated joy, but still.

As Anders ran, he bellowed at no one who could hear him, " _What_ have you gotten yourself into _now_?"


	4. Chapter 4

The thing was, if spirits actually knew how a physical body could leave the Fade on its own, they wouldn't have to shape themselves into human desires and steal other people's corporeal forms in order to get out of the Fade. So as bargains go, Hawke did not really expect much from making this one.

But _make things right_. It was the kind of bargain that she was inclined to make. No blood magic. No loss of self. No corrupted demonic power.

If it really was possible to separate Anders and Justice, it was too little too late; she should have done it years ago. Imagine all the pounds and pounds of cure _that_ prevention would be worth. Hawke felt a little sick, which on the plus side meant that she still wasn't hungry, but on the minus side meant that she had to lean against a rock and hold down her gorge for awhile until the spell past.

"So where is this path you're showing me?" Hawke said finally.

But the spirit was already gone.

"Well, _that_ figures," said Hawke.

But there was a path, and damned if she knew if that path had been there before. Spiking her staff into the loamy earth underfoot like it was a walking stick, she started off. 

It occurred to her after she'd been walking for a little while that the cracks in her armor were gone, and that her body was no longer screaming at her in pain. She glanced around to see if she could spot a telltale gleam of gold to thank for its trouble, but Justice seemed to have vanished.

The path seemed to wind down the cliff, slicing deep into the rock. It was steep in places, making her slow her step and rely on her staff for balance more than as a weapon. So of course, it was before she reached the bottom of the slope that fiery demons swarmed from the cracks in the stone, flying at her as if impelled by sudden fury.

Hawke closed her eyes, lifted her staff, and summoned up the frigid grasp of ice to blast the first of them. As she spent power, she yelled, "Cheer up, you demons! What are you so mad about all the time? Why don't you try some soothing meditation or a nice cup of--"

She had to dodge a monstrous shade and the swipe of its massive claws; she leapt forward, rolling quickly away and coming up on her knees as she angled her staff to spit a burst of lightning at the creature.

"Everybody's a critic," Hawke mourned, and swung her staff around for another pass. She didn't know where she was going, but at this rate, it was going to be a damned long walk.

At least Varric wasn't here to remember the jokes verbatim and recite them at her later when the heat of the moment was gone. She kept telling him comedy, like life, was _timing_.

"Yeah, I don't like herbal tea either," Hawke panted through telling the rage demon as she blasted it to its component parts with a lightning bolt. "Though I'd take some, right about now. . . "

***

_Victory_ was a strong word, but _finished_ was about as good as Fenris figured this was going to get. Gwaren was, as Isabela put it, "half fucked and waiting for the rest," and Fenris wasn't sure if Isabela had been running a blockade of Tevinter ships -- as his confused view of the oceanic battleground seemed to imply -- or simply avoiding attention from everyone and anything on the seas.

"Actually, we ran them into some Tal-Vashoth pirates," Isabela answered him smugly when he asked about the pursuit. "Nobody loves fighting Tevinters like Tal-Vashoth. I love using horny giants as battering rams!"

So it was probably Tevinters.

In order to make landfall at Gwaren, murder had been required. Isabela led a team of sailors in a rowboat to the docks. She'd left Fenris to guard the ship and the slaves. When he'd protested, she'd simply pointed out, "It's your bloody cargo, elf!" 

When she came back, bloody and satisfied, there was a light in her eyes as she greeted him. "Come on," she said, "we'll get your people offloaded and then you are buying me a drink."

So they did.

Fenris was sure he had spied messenger birds with darker feathers among the riot of gulls making a hideous racket amidst the already hideous racket of saving lives and freedom.

It took a great deal of time, effort, and _noise_ to offload forty-eight weary, shaky people from the hold of the massive pirate ship. Isabela's men had helped with blankets, and Fenris had spent all of his money on the passage, so he didn't have much else to give them, but somehow, Isabela had knives, hammers, and pouches of coppers for each of them, including some that were barely old enough to hold the knives themselves.

"Never mind," the Admiral told Fenris cheerfully. "Their owners won't be coming back for them." She tossed a long-bladed dagger in the air, caught it in her teeth on its way back down, and grinned at him around it. 

"I would be more amazed by your dexterity if I were not distracted by your silly hat," Fenris told her.

She laughed in delight, but didn't take off the hat. Instead, she wheeled off to order more of her men to commandeer a horse and cart that looked remarkably like it had once belonged to the Chantry, or perhaps to a squad of templars. Fenris chose not to ask questions. It seemed likely that she would simply tell him that its owner would not be coming back for it.

"I know you're broke now," she told him, over drinks and thin but reasonably palatable stew at a poor little tavern that huddled close to the docks, "so you're going to have to stay with me tonight."

"Isabela," Fenris started to glower at her.

She said, "Don't worry. I'll keep my hands where you can see them."

The place was old. It smelled of smoke, dust, and old wood. Fenris didn't think termites had a smell, but they probably smelled a little like this. He kept resisting the urge to scratch at his scalp out of the weird certainty that if he acknowledged the faint itch from the crawl to his skin, it would turn out to be lice. Or fleas. 

It was probably just the smell.

Fenris leaned forward against the edge of the table, lifting his bowl to sip hot liquid from its rim. There was a spoon, but it looked questionable. Isabela wasn't using hers, either.

"The rum's not bad," Isabela said.

"I think this is supposed to be stew," Fenris pointed out.

"Like I said," Isabela answered him. "The rum's not bad." She stretched backward on the bench, arching her back and showing her curves to their best advantage by what Fenris was sure was _total coincidence_ , and then blew out her breath, puffing a dark fluff of bangs away from her forehead with the exhalation.

Fenris smiled slightly and shook his head. He drank more of the brothy stew (soup?), and reached for the mug of rum next. It was hot, and spiced, and warmed him more than the food had. He hadn't really wanted it, but he felt better for drinking it anyway.

"Where to next?" Isabela asked him.

Fenris shrugged. None of this had been planned, not really. He had no real plans. He could return to the hunt. One man alone could not destroy all of the slaving scum that Tevinter unleashed upon the world, but he could help develop the defenses of war-ravaged Fereldan and Orlais against the rather _informal_ invasion of smugglers in flesh. He was better at tactics than strategy; he wasn't sure how to start.

He said, "I'm not certain."

"Well, if you're bored and you can't figure it out, I noticed you didn't really get seasick, so if you're in the mood for a little light piracy..." Isabela trailed off, leadingly.

Fenris cocked an eyebrow at her. "Really?"

"Why not?" Isabela grinned a crooked little grin at him. "Except if you come aboard more permanently, you can't poke fun at the hat anymore. Admiral's orders. The dignity of the profession, you know."

Fenris thought about it. He smiled a little, breath huffing through his nose past closed lips, and said: "Dealbreaker."

Isabela cackled and raised her mug to him. 

It was a few hours and a few drinks later when she said, "You don't have to decide tonight, Fenris, but I'd be glad to have you." She waited a beat and then said, "If you know what I mean."

"I thought you didn't sleep with your crew," Fenris said, rather than any of the more obvious demurrals that came to mind. 

"I don't," Isabela said. She winked at him. "It doesn't work out. Think of all the advances you could dodge! Do I make you so uncomfortable?"

"No," Fenris said. There might have been a time when this was a lie. It wasn't.

So she laughed, because she had already known the answer, and said, "We'll need to rest up before our next voyage, anyway. So think about it."

Fenris tipped his mug to her, and set it down. He said, "Perhaps I will."

***

"So this path you told me about," Hawke said to a spirit she was pretty sure wasn't listening to her, "did you mean to have it set on with demons and things? Is that what you meant when you said it was hard and unyielding? It couldn't have just meant ... oh, I don't know, made out of rock or something?

"No, no, don't answer. I enjoy monologuing. Really. Sometimes with my friends, I sort of wonder how I get a word in edgewise anyway. Real drama in a good monologue. Particularly with an audience like this one. Hanging on my every word. It's great.

"Rocks. More rocks. Bits of ... rock. How is so much of the Fade made of rock, anyway? I fought a demon made out of rocks once, you know. In the Deep Roads. Big bloody thing. You don't scare me, Fade, with your ... rocks. And more rocks. Rocks everywhere.

"It's not that I'm really complaining about the scenery but you'd think something built out of all the collective dreams of people everywhere would vary it up a little bit more. Maybe some flowers. Or a tree. You'd think there might be a tree once in awhile. 

"I do appreciate the occasional statue of a long dead king. I at least assume it's a king. It's wearing a crown. I suppose it might be a queen. I don't want to make assumptions. I'm sorry if I offended you, my lady. I can see that you don't have a beard or anything. Very humble apologies.

"Justice, are you still there? Are you listening to me? It's all right if you're not. Really, I can keep going all day. Just watch me. Hey--

"Oh, _Maker_ , not spiders _again_."

***

Everything about this place was achingly familiar. The white sand underfoot, the crash of the waves against the rocks, the scraggy plants clinging to life between stone and sand. Dozens of tiny smugglers coves and dens. The scent of salt in his nose. It was beautiful in an ugly, desolate way, and he was surprised by how glad he was to see it.

It was kind of ironic if he really had come to love this place after he'd happened to it with such triumphant catastrophe. 

Anders paid a thin, knobby-boned scavenger he found knocking about the coast too much money from his dwindling supply to deliver a message that was probably going to get him killed. Then he hunkered down into the slick, stony mouth of one of dozens of caves that pocked the stony cliffs of the Wounded Coast, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

He was dozing when the sound of a heavy, armored boot sliding over stand and stone alerted him to the possibility of danger, and at first glance, he had definitely found danger. Tall, solid, strong, in the weighty, plated steel of the guard, in full uniform, right down to the brilliance of the damned _cape_ she wore as it whipped in the whistly seaside breeze. She looked like his oncoming execution and he couldn't understand the rise of spirits in his heart at seeing her grim profile as she strode up from the beach.

Anders watched for awhile to make sure she was alone, and he didn't see so much as a patrolman near her, which in these troubled times was awfully dangerous and he'd mother her about it if he wasn't sure she'd hand him his head.

Then he ducked out of his cave, straightened up, and after a moment spent uncertain quite how to proceed, Anders shrugged a little and waved at her.

Hand on her sword hilt, shield brought to bear with the sigil of Kirkwall blazoned bloody scarlet on it like his very own death sentence, Aveline Vallen came to a halt with her feet planted wide and her eyes narrowed intently on him.

"You've got a lot of nerve showing up here after what you did."

She spoke the words as simple statement of fact, but they were girded by steel. Specifically, the steel that she was restraining herself from applying to his neck. She'd stood by Hawke's decision once, but Anders had long since guessed that there were limits to how much she was prepared to stay her hand, no matter her trust and respect for their longtime friend.

"I know," Anders said. 

Aveline lifted her head slightly, her gaze expectant. She said, "Talk."

"Did you bring it?" Anders asked.

"Talk," Aveline suggested with the barest twitch of a smile at one corner of her mouth, and she took a step towards him, her sword partway from its sheath in a gleam of half-naked steel, "and give me one good reason not to bring you in."

Anders said the only words that could possibly matter, which were, "It's Hawke. She's alive."

Aveline stared at him. 

Then she said, "Anders, so help me, if this is some kind of joke--"

"No joke, no bullshit, it's true, I heard her in the Fade," Anders said, all in a rush, "but I can't get her out myself, and I need all of the help I can get. Aveline, please."

Her sword slid the rest of the way back into its sheath. She still brandished her shield like the bright metal manifestation of a mistrust he had certainly earned.

"I suppose if anyone was going to survive that," Aveline said, half-whispered. It was a rush of breath that spent the words, the sound of hope coming alive again post mortem. He knew the sound; he'd felt it himself, like a punch to the gut.

Anders felt the smile coming, one of so few real smiles he could remember on his lips, and he said, "Yes."

"All right, Anders," Aveline said finally. "What do you need?"

"I need to get to Fereldan. To Gwaren. I have to find Varric. Varric's the only way--" Anders shook his head. "I don't know, but he's the one who knows the most about what happened, who got her mixed up in--"

"Hawke got _herself_ mixed up in everything," Aveline corrected him with the full force of a charge behind her words. "As per usual. But ..." She hesitated, and stared at the fugitive apostate terrorist before her with a deep conflict evident on her face. Finally she said, "I will see what I can do," a little like the words were wrenched out of her one by one, crowbarred past her own ethics by manifest effort.

Anders bit his lip. "Aveline--"

Aveline eyed him for a moment, and then looked disgusted. "I can't believe I'm doing this," she said, and pulled a dark, squat leather case from out of a pocket in her gear. She threw it to the sand at his feet as if she were divesting herself of something disgusting.

"Bless you," Anders said, and dove for the shaving kit as if it were the most precious of objects.

"Please," Aveline growled.

"Thank Donnic for me," Anders added happily as he pulled it open and looked through it.

Scowling, Aveline said, "Not _one_ word," and turned on her heel to march back the way she'd come.

"Gwaren," Anders called after her, slapping the kit shut again and quickly stowing it in the folds of his robes.

"Give me three days," Aveline answered him. 

Anders _thought_ he heard her mutter something like, "And I _may_ have to roll you in a carpet," but he decided that all things considered, it would be better not to ask.


	5. Chapter 5

Food was going to get to be a real problem.

Hawke had slaughtered her way through a wave of spider creatures significantly less awful than the nightmare but still awful, because they were spider creatures. Never at any point in her training with her father and Bethany had she _liked_ the Fade particularly; she had always preferred the aspects of the study of magic that felt more concrete, practical and real. 

Malcolm Hawke had been a conscientious and consistent teacher who wanted his daughters to know as much as they could, particularly about how to control themselves and to control the inherent dangers of their talents. It had left both of them with a healthy aversion to the Fade and its dangers and its demons -- though there was no fear more powerful than the fear of its loss. Loss of the Fade was loss of self, and loss of self was everything.

Bethany's death had seemed like such a pointless, vicious tragedy that Hawke still grew angry about it sometimes. But she was sure her sister preferred being crushed by an ogre than the loss of self becoming tranquil implied.

In a weird way, Hawke was less afraid of dying in the Fade now than when last she'd walked here, because she would simply die. Perhaps she'd make her way to the Maker's side; perhaps not. She didn't know what came after death. But she did know for damned sure that if one of these nasty things sucked the life out of her here, her eyes would not open again in the world beyond, Hawke but not Hawke, alive but unfeeling, patient and passive and pliant.

Still, if she was going to die in the Fade, starvation seemed like a really terrible way to go.

She was quite proud of the solution to the water problem, even if she didn't want to think too hard about where the ice actually came from. Magical energy in the form of frost blasting ice across her path in the wake of a fleeing spider, she had knelt, broken off a piece, and put it in her mouth. It tasted like the coldest ice she had ever felt on her tongue, but also melted as sweet and delicious as the freshest water she had ever tasted, or maybe it was just that she'd been dying for a drink of water and any liquid would have tasted like this.

Well. Maybe not _any_ liquid. She was pretty sure that even at death's door she could not have made herself swallow the nasty ichorous black stuff.

So now she walked, sucking on another broken piece of summoned ice, and wondered how long she had been walking and how long she would walk. She really had no idea.

But in everything she had ever read or heard about the Fade, nobody had mentioned having to eat here, because nobody came here in their bodies, and spirits did not eat. Where nothing lived, there could be no meat. Where nothing grew, there could be no vegetables. 

Without sun or moon, she couldn't tell how long she had been here, and her own sense of time had definitely gotten confused, but as she walked, she found it harder and harder not to dwell on the lack. 

The water helped with the exhaustion that seemed to seep the life from her from the insides of her bones on outward. She was walking with a slight limp after the last fight, although she was almost sure she'd only rolled her damned foot and would be fine when she'd walked it off enough. Nothing like walking alone in an astral wilderness to make you really aware of her own mortality. She wasn't as young as she used to be.

"Oh, stop already," Hawke said aloud, exasperated, and clicked her piece of ice against her teeth as she peered ahead at a fork in the path. One way began climbing again, etched into a mountainside with the false shades of winter trees reaching branches over it in a particularly nasty-looking canopy. The other way ran downhill to fade into a beach of greenish sand and lapping waves, marked by intermittent stones.

She didn't know which way to go, and she was very, very tired.

Finally she walked the rest of the way to the fork in the road, and drew a circle over the ground with her staff, spinning and turning it in the familiar pass of a glyph that would catch danger in a warding hold. Well, some danger. Well, hopefully it would react enough for her to come awake and get to her feet, assuming it lasted long enough, which who knew.

Kneeling in the dirt, she bowed her head and exhaled, setting her staff against her knees and chewing on her lower lip as she faced the choice before her without knowledge of what either way meant. 

Morning was meaningless in a world without day, but perhaps something would make sense to her when she had rested. She could hardly continue forever. She was not, after all, a spirit.

***

Somehow it seemed to take longer to ship out from Gwaren than it had to ship out from the port at Highever. The time at sea had seemed inordinately long, even though it can't have been longer than a few weeks of hard bread and not quite enough water; as much as Isabela and her men seemed involved in an endless love affair with the ocean, they seemed in no hurry to take ship again so quickly, even though there were relatively few entertainments in Gwaren that had survived the upheaval.

"Perhaps tomorrow," Isabela answered carelessly when he asked when she was leaving, but she'd said it for two days in a row now, while she refitted her ship with fresh sails that he hadn't realized it had needed and seemed to repeatedly inventory her stores for water, food and other supplies. It was a very orderly hold, and she seemed to be outfitting it for a very long journey indeed, judging by the amount of dry stores she seemed to be trying to obtain.

Fenris was restless, but could identify no real reason why. Several of his -- his? -- escaped slaves had ended up joining the struggling populace of Gwaren, and one of the younger men in particular had been absorbed by the tavern and seemed to have improved the stew merely by proximity to it. Fenris watched carefully, but could detect no signs of demonic intervention. 

It wasn't immediately clear who the skirmishers were when the first assault on Gwaren was launched, but by the second fight, it was very clear that the Templar armor they wore had not been appropriated; it was made too well, fit too well. The weird red lyrium glow was an appalling, horrific mimicry of the bright glow of his own tattoos when he was fighting at full force. 

Isabela's men were not all as capable fighters as she herself, but then, Isabela was uniquely capable. As he defended the front gates of the city from five, then six, then eight men wreathed in red glow whose bodies screamed dark smoke as he killed them, she was suddenly at his back.

"Don't worry!" she crowed at him as she danced between their foes, blades spinning wildly. "Yours are _far_ more attractive!"

Fenris spun after her with the wide sweep of his blade cutting across two of their legs. He growled, "--I'm reassured."

After the last of them fell, he knelt beside one of them and stared for a long time at the red-pocked ruin of what had once been a human face. 

"Well," Isabela said as she calmly wiped a bloody dagger off on the stunted grass nearest the road, "those definitely weren't Tevinters."

"No," Fenris said.

Isabela screwed up her face in a grimace and sighed, " _And_ you killed two more of them than I did, so I suppose that means I have to buy the drinks."

Fenris tilted his head in a slight inclination to her as he hefted his sword above his shoulder. "Indeed," he said.

This time, the drinks meant whiskey. Fenris wasn't sure where it had come from, but he didn't bother to ask. It tasted like very welcome heat on his tongue, evaporating quickly in his mouth because it was that strong. He closed his eyes for a moment, leaning his elbows on the table as he framed the ugly iron cup in both his hands.

The tavern was noisy with the aftermath of the fight and the spoils that they had taken from the bodies. Fenris hadn't wanted to touch the lyrium-infused bodies with a discomfort that bordered on superstitious, and Isabela had liberated some coin but had otherwise seemed quite content to follow his lead. Still, there was a lot of noise and laughter and even something that might charitably be called music from one corner of the tavern.

A high, unfamiliar voice cut across the noise, "Admiral Isabela?"

Isabela was in the midst of chairing a debate between her men about the red templars they had just fought and didn't hear.

"Admiral Isabela," called the voice again, and Fenris looked up towards its owner. It was a young human, spotty and scragglebearded, wearing an inquisition tabard that definitely did not fit him properly. "I've a message, Admiral!"

Isabela didn't seem to notice. Sighing a little, Fenris pushed himself upright and walked to the messenger. He held out his hand for it.

"I'll see that she gets it," he said to the youth when he balked at the stranger before him.

"I-- I've a message for you too, sir," the youth gulped. "I -- I was told I could find you--" He choked off the words and looked around as if he was looking for support from someone invisible. "I have messages for-- all of her--." He broke off a second time and began to look unusually frightened.

It was the fear of a young man who knew exactly what he carried.

Fenris felt the cold fingers of dread wrap around his heart. "What is it," he demanded, his hand still outstretched for Isabela's letter.

"I've-- I've your message in my bag, it's from Master Tethras," the youth was explaining, backing toward the door of the tavern.

Fenris was on him in an instant, yanking him off his feet and holding him up by a stranglehold on his collar. "Tell me," he roared with a sudden blaze of anger totally disproportionate to the dithering, while in his head he could hear his own voice already saying no, no, no.

He wouldn't believe it. He couldn't believe it. It wasn't happening. None of this was happening. 

But he knew what the words were before the messenger even managed to stumble past, "Please, it's Hawke, she's--"

Fenris felt everything in him rejecting this truth. He threw the boy down and watched him hit the floor with force enough to daze him, and as he stood over him, one naked heel to either side of the young man on the salt-soaked wood of the tavern floor, he raised his hand in a haze of unwilling rage to rip his lying voice from its thready pipes in his throat.

Before his blow could fall, Isabela was there in an instant, without a care for what the boy could see between the wide plant of her legs as she braced before Fenris. He'd have to plunge his arm through the defensive angle of hers before he could strike. For a wild moment, he wanted to anyway. It felt like anguish written in every line of his body and he wanted to use it to destroy all of them, every last one of them, every table, every chair, and definitely every smile. 

He moved forward to push her back, away from him, away from his prey, or just because he was there, he wasn't certain. She moved so quickly he found it hard to track, even with his heightened reflexes, the battle rage rising in him to sear his blood and bring the fierce glow as of blue flame to his skin. 

"Get back!" Fenris could hear himself shout at her, hand lifted for his weapon.

He wasn't sure what she said, but he could tell it was something, and it might have been "Not a chance," because she used his advance with a slick kick of one foot that brought her hip forward into him, unseating his balance, and suddenly she had thrown him to the floor. In a distant way he thought he could hear the choked cry of the young messenger scrambling away from his near death experience beneath the tables. 

Isabela was straddling him. He bucked his hips, flailing out with an arm to get purchase on something, anything that he could improvise for a weapon since from down here he couldn't reach his sword. She slammed her hand down across his armored shoulder with sufficient force to jar him hard against the wooden floor and then, inexplicably, her mouth was on his.

Fenris was too surprised to react at first. Her mouth tasted of heat and whiskey, and atop him, she was all demand. It was the fiercest, most vehement kiss he could remember in years, and it was not as though Hawke had ever been _shy_. Afterwards, he couldn't understand where the sense had come from, but he felt that somehow, there had been compassion in it.

Then Isabela bit his lip. It hurt.

"All right, boys," Isabela said. She was off him, but hauling him up in an instant. She'd unstripped the sash belt she wore and wrapped it around his waist, as if she were roping him up to claim a prize. He nearly balked again just from the sense of it, the _imagery_ of it.

"I can't _believe_ \--" Fenris started to snarl, and she yanked forward in her grip, so that he had to catch his balance again.

"Show's over, except for me," Fenris heard her saying. "Admiral's prerogative. Off you go, never mind, _come with me you damned idiot_ \--" This last she somehow hissed to Fenris in an undervoice in the process of herding him out of the commons, to the rickety stairwell, and to the hallway, and it was only then that he realized what she was doing.

She was getting him the hell out of there.

Once in her bedroom, she slammed the door shut, locked it, and then barred it with a slatted piece of wood. Both her hands pressed against the door, Isabela breathed out. He wasn't sure what she'd seen. What she'd heard. What she knew.

Fenris started to say something but his voice caught in his throat. His hands fisted helplessly at his sides.

"Break it all," Isabela told him. She smiled at him, and somehow it was the saddest smile he had ever seen on her face. She said, "They'll just think you tried to be on top."

So he did.

The destruction was wanton. He wasn't even sure what all she'd given him to smash afterwards, though the rickety chair and uneven-legged desk that had stood in one corner of the inn's room definitely looked like they'd been hit by a hurricane by the time he was through. It was unworthy and miserable, a tantrum of epic proportions. He was so furious with Hawke for leaving him behind. It was a rage that spent itself in pointless waste, and his knuckles were bloody and his body had caught multiple splinters in weird places by the time he was done with it.

When he had finally spent himself, Isabela knew, because he found her crushed in the embrace of his arms despite how uncomfortable it must have been in the scrape of armor and hilt and blade. He buried his face in the heat of her neck and wrung the rest of himself out in tears as pointless and bitter as the violence had been, and she said nothing. She made a soft, hushed sound as her fingers stroked through his hair, and he realized that he didn't know how long she'd been petting him, that he didn't know how long he'd been burying himself in her, that he didn't know how much he needed simple touch until she'd given it to him.

Isabela touched her forehead to his, and her lashes were matted thick and wet with tears as she stroked her knuckles down the side of his face. 

She said nothing, so neither did he.

There wasn't really anything to say.

When she moved to escape the cling of his arms, he tightened his grip. Isabela's breath escaped on a soft rush that almost sounded like a laugh, but she pressed her lips to his forehead, and then stayed with him.

She stayed a long, long while. Even when he finally relaxed his arms, when she slid away from him, it was only to get water from the basin and then ease him back into the bed. She was still there, sitting up with one bare foot tucked beneath her when, spent from grief and anger and loss, he fell asleep.

It didn't occur to him to think of it until days later. But it was probably the kindest thing that anyone had ever done for him.

***

Hawke fought her way clear of shreds of uncomfortable sleep in the midst of the Fade and discovered, on waking, that she could remember none of it. So the answer to the question of what happened while you dreamed in the dreaming was still beyond her.

When she opened her eyes, she opened them and found herself staring into a face like a repulsive pile, fold upon fold of gray-purple skin fallen back on itself.

"What the--"

Hawke scrambled the rest of the way to her feet, gripping her staff.

Then she realized why it looked so familiar. Sleeping in the Fade had brought her to the attention of a particularly befuddled sloth demon.

Hawke thought, _Ugh_.

"This isn't right," the sloth demon rumbled in a voice like lethargy. It seemed to syrup down her spine and she felt herself shudder. "You don't belong here."

"That's for damn sure," Hawke said, and leveled her staff at it. She didn't want to fight a sloth demon. For one thing, she didn't like the implication from the universe in general that resting here had been slothful. 

The demon almost seemed to ooze in discomfort, very slow in its expression of displeasure as it reared up before her. "This isn't right," it said again.

"I'll give you one chance to get out of my way," Hawke growled at it.

She was mildly surprised when the demon slunk its way off into the shadows, soon swallowed up by curves in the stony path, back the way she'd come. She lowered the staff and scrubbed at her face, trying to banish sleep from her eyes and frustrated tension from her mouth.

"All right, then," Hawke said.

She still didn't know which way to go.

Looking at both paths, she blasted ice into being in the place where her glyph had long since faded out, and crouched as she broke off a larger piece to suck on. 

The beach path seemed to call to her, with its rolling waves and the shimmer of a false, green sun upon the water. She watched it, swallowing around her mouthful of magic ice, and felt that although it did not quite have the _look_ of anything familiar, it carried echoes of several seas she'd known. The Waking Sea, and Kirkwall, and the place she'd made a home.

Hawke sighed as her gaze rolled toward the mountain path. It was all fierce stone and terrifying drops off of cliffs and a hard, uphill climb.

There were few paths more yielding than sand, and few paths harder than mountains. 

Stabbing into the ground with the stroke of her staff, Hawke turned her face resolutely toward what could almost be the Frostback Mountains and began, step by step, to climb. 

***

Aveline hadn't rolled Anders in a carpet.

She had, however, caused him to be packed into a crate barely large enough to fit him and loaded into a ship bound south.

The crate smelled very strongly of Antivan spices to which Anders thought it was very possible he might be allergic.

"Maybe this is what penance is supposed to be like," Anders mused to the lid of the crate.

The smuggler, unfortunately nearby for this lapse of discipline, thumped it with his fist and said, "Pipe down."

Anders piped down.

It was going to be a long, long trip.


	6. Chapter 6

Hawke climbed.

The mountains rose up around her. There was a path, its slope stark and its surface hard; its angle bit deep enough into the rock to make it passable, but her legs burned with the effort, and if it weren't for the brace of her staff, she might have lost her footing more than once. 

She'd gone long enough that she could no longer see the fork far behind and below. She spent a lot of time running, hiking, and fighting all over the Free Marches, and yet now, as she made her slow, grim way up the mountainside, her breath huffed, her muscles ached, and sweat was getting into uncomfortable places.

To add insult to injury, it was also getting colder.

As she came to a plateau, she paused, and leaned heavily on the staff-cum-walking stick. "Maybe I'm going the wrong way," she said to no one in particular. "Nothing's attacked me in awhile."

The dark wedge of stone angled out from the side of the mountain, cliff face dropping to labyrinthine depths far below that she could not see. Hawke walked to the edge of the precipice, planted her staff there, and looked down.

"Did I really walk all that way?" she wondered, peering down what seemed to be the endless length of the cliff face. "Have I been walking for an actual year?"

Hawke thought about how strange time could be in dreams, how chopped up and impossible they could be, and felt a sudden frisson of fear about what real life could look like if she ever did manage to get out of here. What if she emerged two years from now? What if the Inquisition failed, and Corypheus ran amok over Thedas, and she escaped the Fade just in time to see a darkspawn rip open the borders of reality to destroy the world?

Hawke stepped back from the precipice, shaking her head to clear the spectres of nightmare from her mind. She'd defeated it in combat. She could certainly defeat it when it was just her own thoughts, chasing themselves in pointless circles. She would walk the path; it was about what she could do.

As she turned, she saw that on the border of the plateau and the path biting back into the wall of the mountainside, there was a broad oval frame of stone, irregular rock with a great hole in it that almost, _almost_ reminded her of the shape of Merrill's awful mirror.

But it was empty.

Hawke studied it as she stepped closer, and poked at it with the end of her staff only to find that the imbued material went through just there was nothing there. She kicked at the ground until she shook loose a fragment of rock, kneeling as she lifted it in her hand. Hefting it on her palm, she eyed it, and then threw it through the open portal. It ricocheted off the mountain wall behind to skitter down into the depths behind her.

She looked down again, and frowned.

"What _am_ I missing?" she wondered.

She couldn't decide if she was disappointed or relieved when, again, nothing answered her. It was actually getting pretty wearing, all of this talking to herself.

***

The fighting in and around Gwaren gave Fenris something to think about besides a world drained of color. Because of the fighting, there was color. Of course, the color was mostly ... red.

Isabela wasn't one for pitched battles and neither were her sailors, really; yet holding onto the port for access to the sea without crossing north overland was important enough to fight for. For Fenris, it didn't really matter who was trying to take the port of Gwaren. What mattered was that there were dozens of them, that they gleamed with unnatural red protuberances of lyrium, and that he wanted to kill someone.

Days passed in a small pocket of war that seemed somewhat divorced from the rest of Thedas. Messengers came and went. Reinforcements did not come in the way of soldiers, although shipments of food and medical supplies diverted from elsewhere came into Gwaren at the beginning of the second week. 

Isabela spent the time being so aggressively normal that, if he hadn't known better, he could have believed every moment of it. It only made him question how many times before she'd lied without using a single word.

In the midst of some apparently particularly hearty carousing, Fenris picked up Isabela's tankard, threw it on the floor, and demanded, "How do you _do_ that?" 

Pursing her lips at the sudden quiet of her sailors nearby, Isabela flattened both palms on the table, rose, and then stood straight. Standing, she glared at him. "Shut up and live, Fenris," she said. "You should try it some time."

And then her smile was back, as if it had never been gone; she said, "Aw, look at that. Now you owe me a new drink."

Fenris bought her one. It seemed the thing to do. 

Of his refugees that had left Gwaren, a number were filtering back as it became very clear how unsafe the roads were, not only with the embittered struggle of those who had fled the circles and those who pursued them, but with a more fearful war, and with all the hazards that came of a lawless countryside.

Some of those seeking refuge were better armed now, though, and Fenris found that he was teaching a few of them to fight, slowly and awkwardly at first, but with growing confidence as they improved.

Isabela watched him with a crooked smile, taking passes with several of the young men and women fighting with wooden practice swords they'd shaven out of sticks and broken boards.

"You're quite good at that, you know. I've half a mind to sign a good quarter of my boys up for lessons," she said.

"If they'd choose to learn from me," Fenris had scoffed. 

"Well, I _expect_ you'd look more like a combat trainer if you wore shoes, sweet thing." Isabela tipped up her Admiral's hat and gave him a particularly obnoxious smile.

"You would probably look more like an admiral if you wore trousers," Fenris returned the serve in kind.

Isabela only laughed, and went away. 

The next day, several of her men were watching the impromptu lesson; the day after that, he actually was teaching several of them. Or, at least, the ones who were sober enough. He'd never seen a group of men that drank as much as the sailors from Isabela's command.

In the morning, just before dawn, Fenris awoke from a fitful sleep to the clanging sound of the dock's bell as several part-time stevedores were rounded up to unload a shipload of cargo. When he left the narrow slightly-larger-than-closet that had become his room more or less by default, Isabela was striding past down the hall on solid, thunking steps. She greeted him with an "Oh, bright and early, are you?" and a slap on the ass in passing.

At first, Fenris felt tension writing itself down his spine. His first impulse to bite and snap, he drowned it in a long breath. With as much blandness as he could muster: "One of these days you're going to lose a hand when you do that."

"Ooh, feisty." Isabela proceeded down the stairs on thumping steps. "Kirkwall's the port of call," she said as she hit the bottom step. "Want to see if Aveline has sent us anything pretty?"

"Aveline has her hands full without doing your shopping," Fenris muttered as he trailed after her out of the inn.

The docks were a bustle and throng of noise despite the earliness of the hour. Fenris tried not to yawn. It was by no means the first night in the inn he'd slept badly, and his body seemed to thrum with old pain on days like this, spidering along the lines of lyrium etched deep into his flesh. When no one was looking, but only when no one was looking, Fenris rubbed his neck.

He thought of Hawke's touch, and tightened his jaw against the knot of pain _that_ brought.

Heavy crate after heavy crate was being lofted and carried out of the belly of the ship and carted off for division to the lone standing Gwaren warehouse. Isabela's men were doing most of the direction, but she let out a bright laugh and a, "Oh, that one's definitely for me. See that ink stamp? Admiral Slattern? Very proper and correct, big girl. Over here, let's have a look..."

Two strong and shirtless young men hefted the marked crate off to the side for Isabela's viewing and enjoyment -- Fenris did not choose to guess at whether the crate or the young men were really the part that was for Isabela's viewing and enjoyment -- and suddenly balked; one of them yelped, and the crate seemed to twitch and jerk in their hands of its own accord. Fenris started forward in alarm as the heavy thing crashed to the ground. 

It rocked with the impact, and Isabela shoved one of the boys out of the way, darting forward to drive a blade into the waxy seal that held the crate's lid in place, and then pried with her full weight dropped on the hilt of the knife as lever. The lid sprang open and she peered inside. Fenris had no idea what could make Isabela's face look like that. Maybe if she'd bitten into a lemon.

"Well," Isabela said in a voice that strangled laughter, " _that_ was not the kind of pretty I was expecting. I have to admit."

Fenris hastened to her side to look, and found himself reaching for his weapon almost entirely on reflex as he snarled, " _You._ "

Inside the crate, Anders had definitely seen better days. His features were lined with an ungroomed, scraggly beard, he desperately needed a bath, and he'd somehow managed to lose weight even since the last time Fenris had seen him. He still didn't look like an ordinary abomination. The glow that sometimes blazed through him as the demon burst forth with self-righteous incandescence was absent. Which meant that he was merely dormant, and it was only a matter of time before he _went off_. Again. 

"Yes," Anders said, licking cracked lips as he peered up at them from inside the crate. "Me."

Fenris was abruptly so angry he couldn't form words. That Hawke had died and that this murdering terrorist of an abomination still did the world the discourtesy of walking around and breathing was too much for him to bear. The weapon was already in his hands and he lifted it for a killing blow, the rage blossoming inside him with a cold detachment that felt more welcome than any emotion had these past weeks. 

If Fenris struck quickly enough, perhaps he could behead the filthy bastard before power fueled by demon rage blasted into him. Either way, it would be worth it to destroy him once and for all. Hawke was all that had stopped him before, and Hawke wasn't here now.

Isabela made no move to stop him, though she also made no move to join him. She stood with hands athwart her hips, head tipped, eyebrows up. Her mouth looked more sour than usual. She parted her lips to speak.

***

Hawke walked on. Fingers of frost began to line the stones as she crept higher into the mountain, and her breath began to come in steamy puffs as she edged ever onward, ever upward, into an endless pale green sky. As high as she climbed, the shadow of the city above her never seemed to grow any closer. About that, she was certain she was relieved.

She passed more formations in the rock that looked like they ought to be portals, wide circles in the stone through which she could throw pebbles or shoot lightning bolts or throw ice to no particular purpose. 

The cold grew sharp, and seemed to claw at her through armor and fabric as she went further up. Still there was no stirring of another creature in this place, and the only sound was her own breath, puffing past her lips or groaning a little as she worked her way up the endless mountainside. 

The peak shimmered above and beyond her, and it seemed to Hawke as she grew nearer to it that the glow of white that capped it was more like starlight than it was like snow.

"Listen up, Fade, I'm from Fereldan," Hawke said to herself as she squinted up at it. "I'm not afraid of a little snow."

Even though she ached, and felt as though stiffness defined every muscle in her body, Hawke smiled to herself a little, blew out her breath, and hiked on.

***

"Wait!" Anders yelped. He flung both his hands up and closed his eyes, trying to hold his breath and keep back the sudden panic of self-preservation and what might come with it.

If he lost control now, if the fury took him, if he killed _them_ , there would be no going back. Even if he somehow managed to find a way to bring her back from the Fade alone, if he murdered any of the others, it wasn't just that Hawke would kill him. It was what it could do to her.

After all, he lived solely because of her judgment. If he spilled blood now, it would be on her hands. 

"Fenris, don't!" he yelled as he surged to his feet. 

Murder was in the elven face, wild and terrible with grief and fury that Anders tried not to think about too much. The first glimpse of it clanged into him with an awful, echoing familiarity, resonating in his bones as if he'd been standing too close to a bell when it was rung.

Fenris didn't even slow down. If Anders hadn't summoned up the shimmering cloud of a barrier to deflect the bite of impact, the elf would already have taken his head.

"Damn it!" Anders roared at him, fighting desperately against the rising fury that threatened to eat him from his inside out. "Stop and listen to me! I'm trying to tell you we can save her!"

Fenris wasn't listening. He wound up for another swing, lyrium tattoos blazing as he surged forward and swung his sword. Anders scrambled out of the crate just in time; as the huge greatsword clove the brittle boards of the box in half, he felt his knees buckle and his legs give out from too long spent confined in there, despite all he had done to limit the damage to his poor abused body. He rolled along the ground and curled in on himself, as if to make himself a smaller target.

"Fenris--" he yelped.

Anders was dimly aware of Isabela taking a step back as if to give Fenris more room to swing. _Well, then,_ Anders thought grimly. 

But then he saw her face as she bent over him, peering down at his head. Her hair fell forward, and he had a very strange angle on the dangle of her earrings, and the flare of her nostrils as she huffed a breath down at him. 

"Get back," Fenris roared.

Isabela snapped her fingers in front of Anders's face, pointed at Fenris, and then said, "Say again, Anders?"

Anders let his head fall back against the ground, nearly ready to cry in relief. "We need to save Hawke," he said. "She's alive. She's in the Fade."

Although the noise and bustle of the docks hadn't stopped, it seemed for a moment as though the three of them were encircled in a private island of silence, through which nothing else could get through.

Fenris's voice strained to cracking point as he said, "...Alive?"

Wordless, Anders nodded.

Isabela settled her weight back on her heels and let out a long, low whistle through pursed lips. "All right, mage boy," she said, "so how in _bloody_ fucking _hell_ are we supposed to do that?"

His momentum spent in exhaustion, Anders closed his eyes and didn't say anything for awhile. When he opened them again, it was to a heavy, metallic clatter. Fenris had dropped his sword; the elf's long-fingered hands were limp at his sides as if he'd forgotten what they were for.

Anders said, "Well, I don't know _exactly_."

Fenris said, too quickly to be as if it was a reasonable question, "Then why shouldn't I kill you, then!" 

The anger started to rise inside Anders and he spent more of it, deliberately, in a long low groan as he lay on the wooden dock. Then he propped himself up on his elbows, smearing one hand over his battered and scratchy face. "Can I have some water?"

"No!" Fenris snapped.

"Oh, get up." Isabela offered him her hand, and then hauled him up to his feet with startlingly ready strength. "Faugh, you reek worse than half a ship's worth of sailors all at once."

"Water. Please," Anders said. 

Fenris stepped forward instead, moving into Anders's space without any apparent regard for the odor Isabela mentioned. He quivered with an effort of constraint, violence written into every line of him, and Anders thought, _one murderer to another_ , as Fenris stared him down, green eyes bright and eerie about an inch from his face.

Then Anders realized why they looked so strange, a heartbeat later. It was because as hard and sharp with fury as the elf's gaze was, his eyes glimmered with unspent tears.

"If this is some madness of yours, abomination," Fenris said in a voice so hoarse with hatred it was very nearly a gasp, "I will rip out your heart and I will _crush it_."

"You will try," Anders said, and he could hear the terrible refraction in his voice, feel the righteous fury boiling up in him as the white heat of vengeance seething from his skin.

"If you're going to do that, I'd appreciate it if you got naked first," Isabela said. "I could sell tickets."

They both looked at her. Anders realized that their heads turned at the exact same time, and some part of him that wasn't shaken to its core as he struggled to get a grip on himself really wanted to laugh. 

"Noted," Fenris rasped, and turned away to collect his sword from the ground.

"It's not safe for me to be around people. Please, just-- get me some water, and we'll--" Anders started.

"Rubbish. These days, we own this town." Isabela winked at him, and then took his arm. "But it's certainly not _hygienic_ for you to be around people. Do you expire if you touch a bathtub? Is that something that happens to abominations?"

"...No." Anders no longer protested the hateful word. He was just too tired.

"Good," Isabela said. Bizarrely, she patted his cheek, and began steering him across the docks through the bustling crowd of sailors and dockworkers and the myriad throng of other people that seemed to swarm Gwaren's every corner. How were there so many people? Anders wanted to hide. He swallowed, fighting a sense of vicious contempt for them all that did not feel at all at home inside him.

He scrunched his eyes shut, opened them again as he inhaled, and then glanced at Isabela as she steered him toward a particular ramshackle building huddled close to the warehousing nearby.

Blankly, Anders asked, "Is that an _Admiral's_ hat?"

Isabela cackled and shoved him inside through the front door.


	7. Chapter 7

It was _fucking cold_ up here.

Hawke felt it undignified that her nose was getting chapped in frosty air that was not even real frosty air.

She kept sucking on false ice, which didn't help with the cold, but at least kept the thirst from sapping her strength along with the gnawing hunger. She ignored it as best she could; it was hardly the first time she had journeyed while terribly uncomfortable.

As much as she mocked the cold at first, though, it was starting to get to her. Her throat felt raw from sucking in breaths that felt frozen. She kept feeling like her eyelashes might be about to freeze against her cheeks every time she blinked.

Finally, she sighed, and stopped, standing a little dizzily in the midst of the frosty path. The air tasted thin and sharp on her tongue. The sky seemed to stretch endlessly around her, but for the peaks of other snow-capped mountains cresting geologically nearby. Far below, the world paled to a weird, eerily green insignificance.

It wasn't going to get any warmer higher up. Puffs of white seemed to ghost away from the path ahead as she looked, as if gouts of snow geysered forth from the crags reaching toward the peak. But she could stop and rest awhile. Get warm.

She blasted the ground with a gout of fire from her staff, and then, as the snow melted away to reveal a sludgy muck beneath, she did it again, and then again, until she had baked herself a patch of earth on which to kneel. She closed her eyes as she summoned up more fire, soaking it into the stone beneath, etching a flame trap that she then smiled and triggered into a roaring blaze.

She was close enough that she almost felt scorched. It was delicious.

Something might come for her in the Fade, drawn by her strangeness and by the brilliant light and heat, but at the moment, she felt ready to face all of it. There was nothing like the first warmth when you were very cold. 

Closing her eyes, she thought of other times she had been warm.

Her first thoughts were for her long-abandoned bed, tangling her limbs with the lithe, dark form beside her. His lips breathing the soft heat of breath against her collarbone, the soft fluff of his silvery hair tickling her chin. Fenris had always seemed to run just a little hot, his arms winding close against her naked skin, her fingers tracing the battery of lyrium scars that ravaged the otherwise clean and elegant lines of him. 

He shuddered, sometimes, when she touched him. She asked, "Do you want me to stop?" and he whispered, in a voice heavy as if the scars had bitten inside him as well as out, "...No."

Then she'd followed up with her tongue. 

The catch in his voice when he moaned for her warmed her even now. She tried to draw the scent of his skin into her mind, but it felt so distant she couldn't quite grasp it. She closed her fist around the staff and opened her eyes again as she stared into the fire she had made.

They'd had so little time. It wasn't bloody fair, how few and precious those memories were. A tiny handful of them, rare and sparkling as diamond chips, clutched hard in her fingers, between the day he had come back to her, and the night she'd left him again. Even if it was for his own damned good.

She should have brought him along just to keep her warm at night.

Closing her eyes again, Hawke sighed as she curled inward against the warmed ground, near the fire, and shivered away just a little more of the chill. She had rested before the climb, but now she was exhausted, as if she'd been climbing for days with nothing to sustain her except the water she forged with frost magic. 

"On a mountaintop," Hawke mumbled to herself. "Great idea, Hawke. Just what you need. More snow."

She tried to conjure Fenris in her thoughts again, but she found her mind drifting to a different kind of heat. Less pleasant to dwell on, and all was supposedly forgiven, but that had been a bad, bad night, when he'd bolted, raw with his own anguish, and left her to storm around her estate afterwards in amongst a panoply of wealth that felt more empty than a hovel.

Nothing had helped. Especially not getting drunk. Especially not getting drunk with _Varric_. Maker, what a terrible idea that had been. _And_ she was pretty sure he'd told everyone, and she hadn't meant to breathe a word.

Why did stupid things she'd done years ago haunt her even now? Why couldn't she dwell on awesome things she'd done? She'd done so many awesome things. 

She'd gone to Anders. He'd been desperate for her, desperately angry, desperately alone, and generally, desperate. His mouth had been like so much vicious heat, exactly what she needed, and when he'd come to her that night, she'd been so close. 

Of course, he couldn't keep his mouth shut about bloody Fenris, and then she'd gotten to rage about how soft in the head she'd gone. At least she hadn't told Varric about _that_. At least, not right away. Not until much afterwards, when she could make some obvious jokes about it, of the kind that could be used to warn Anders to watch his damn fool mouth.

He had been heat, too, though. Like flame and magic. Like a storm barely contained. She'd wanted it. Badly.

Later, she'd wanted to cut his head off. She'd really wanted to. She'd earned enemies for her and for Kirkwall, not doing it. 

But death is what martyrs want. She had cursed him to live with it, instead, and she hadn't smiled when he'd thanked her for it. By the time she'd gotten him out of Kirkwall, he had figured out it was a curse. 

"So this is freedom," Anders said with Vengeance blazing through him like the flames beneath, and he looked at her, not with gratitude for saving his life, but with something much more ambivalent.

"Get used to it," Hawke said, and turned her back on him.

She shivered a little more, lacing her hands against the back of her neck as she squeezed her eyes tighter shut. She hadn't told Fenris how close she'd come to Anders when he'd left her the first time. She suspected he knew, but she couldn't say for sure. Fenris hated him so much it was hard to tell what was specific and what was just general principles.

Not that she blamed him, exactly.

A little inconvenient, though.

From time to time.

***

"I can't go to the _seat of the Inquisition_ ," Anders yelped. "Are you mad?"

Fenris looked at him in a particularly saturnine way. "Whyever not?" he said. It was very obvious to all of them why not, but Fenris found that he enjoyed provoking the mage by speaking in the mildest of all possible tones. It was viciously easy to needle him, and not entirely unlike playing with fire.

Any second now, Anders would detonate, and Fenris would have no choice but to kill him. What a sad loss it would be.

Anders fumed visibly, but just as the beginnings of blue light began to crack through him and seep into his voice: "You are the most arrogant--"

"That's where Hawke went," Isabela cut him off, smoothly refocusing his attention on her. "That's how Hawke got into this mess in the first place, right? Stands to reason we go there. You don't have to go _inside_ , Anders. I'm sure you can keep safe in the Fereldan wilderness there as much as anywhere."

"It's crawling with templars!" Anders spluttered a little, and then looked weary, smearing his hand across his face and then back through his hair. "I'm of no use to either of you if I'm taken by the Inquisition."

"What a change of pace," Fenris growled.

" _Stop_ ," Anders demanded. His voice had grown terrible. There was a crack in it that sounded a like real anguish, too close to a true breaking point.

Fenris did not feel particularly chastised, but with a cock of his eyebrow, he chose to refrain. He said, "We will ensure you remain useful, mage."

Anders hesitated. Then, slowly, his hands dropping to his sides, he nodded. "I don't see another way," he says. "I wish I did, but I don't."

"Plus!" Isabela smiled, and spread her arms wide. "The foremost expert in Thedas on walking physically out of the Fade will be right there to bother. Haven't you heard Varric's tales about the Herald?"

"Well," Fenris said, dismissing the storied history of the Inquisitor and Herald of Andraste with a flick of his wrist and a low, dry: " _Varric_."

"At least a third of it is true," Isabela said, framing her hips with both hands as she cocked her head.

"I've heard some," Anders said a little doubtfully. "This may come as a surprise to you, but I'm not exactly in anybody's ... friendly ... Wicked Grace game, or anything, these days."

"Ha," Fenris said, voice dark. He considered the stories a little unwillingly. The kindled hope inside him seared him when he looked directly at it; he had to approach it sideways, in his periphery, or it blazed up and threatened to eat him at his core. 

_Alive._

On the one hand, he almost didn't believe it. It was too good to be true. 

On the other hand, he cursed himself for ever doubting it. As if a little thing like the oldest nightmare that plagued the minds of men could ever be enough to kill _Marian Hawke._

"Drawn into the Fade by fell magic, something something, Andraste picked her up, plonked her right out of the Fade, green fires of the Maker's will blazing out of her hand to stop the hole in the sky," Isabela summarized. "Tale gets taller every time I hear it. Definitely true about the hole in the sky, though." She pointed up. It was a little silly; they were sitting around a table in the tavern, eating stew and dried fruit, and there was no seeing the scarred sky through the walls.

Fenris exhaled a low breath past his nose and looked to Isabela. "Skyhold cannot be approached by sea."

"I know," Isabela mourned with a great depth of sadness in her voice. "I shall have to leave her in dock, poor thing."

Fenris nodded. For some things, Isabela would stay aground. There was no part of him that was surprised this was one of them. 

"If we are to do this," Anders said, "we shouldn't waste any more time. I think I'm well enough to travel again."

Fenris glanced at him. He looked weak, grim, and pale, but a night's rest, some food, and a bath had done him ... some good.

"First thing tomorrow," Isabela said, firm in decision. She adjusted the set of her Admiral's hat. "I need to make arrangements for my crew and my ship." 

Fenris stood. He needed to prepare himself for a long journey's vigilance spent staring at an abomination that was about to go off. He said, "Very well."

Reluctantly, Anders said: "All right..."

"You had better get a shave, too, Anders," Fenris heard Isabela saying crisply as he strode out the door. "You make my thighs itch just _looking_ at you."

Somehow, Fenris resisted the urge to glance back and see Anders's face at that one. 

***

"Mmmmm."

The sound was somewhere between moan and purr, a low, purling sound in a woman's voice that was not her own. 

Hawke's eyes snapped open.

Her fantasy had spun on in the sleepy warmth of the firelight. In the privacy of a woman alone in the Fade, indeed, the only physical body in the entire fucking place, Hawke had felt free to abuse her dream lovers in ways that both of them would be appalled by. She needed no imagination to remember the feel of Fenris buried inside her, driven to the hilt; the fierce blaze of Anders's mouth she could place differently in memory with a little work. Her ear; her throat; her breast; her belly, between the spread of Fenris's long fingers as he gripped her hips with near enough force to bruise. 

Definitely inconvenient that they hated each other.

It had been particularly satisfying to rip Anders's stupid feathered cloak from him and scrape her nails hard enough over the lean muscle to leave marks on his skin; it made no sense whatsoever to bite Anders's mouth while she straddled Fenris and his sharply angled hips, but who needed fantasy to make sense? 

The desire demons who were watching her, probably.

"Ugh," Hawke groaned. "Typical."

She snagged her staff, jammed it hard against the ground, and hauled herself to her feet. She was only a little disoriented. The flush she felt burning in her cheeks was just being too close to the damn fire. And wanting to murder demons.

"Wow," she said, "I rate two of you? Special."

The demons laughed. Both of them, one an eerie echo of the other. They oozed forward, undulating like breasty serpents. Their bodies and faces were not identical, but their movements were twinned in sensual invitation of the eye.

Hawke brandished the staff. "You're just going to die, demons," she said. "Why do you do this?"

"Such lovely temptations," said one.

"Beautiful lust," said the other.

"I hate you so much," Hawke said with great sincerity, and blasted fire at them. 

One of the demons screamed in outrage, like it was surprised. It summoned up a haze of frost and blasted it at her. Hawke deflected it with a shielding barrier. She did not choose to think of the desire demons as actually female, no matter how they postured. They were things. Nasty, horrible, perverse things. Who were shooting ice at her. She'd only just gotten warm, blast it. 

The other one said, "Hush now, little mage."

"Little!" Hawke expostulated. "You've got to be kidding me."

"I can give you both of them," it sultried, in a voice like melting honey.

Hawke was distracted enough from her embarrassed disgust and anger by this to laugh. "Maker, yes," she said. "I'm sure neither of them would notice the blood magic. Sorry, kids--" She blasted more fire at them, earning more screams, and then followed it up with a chain of lightning that fried across both their skins. "Not interested."

_Magic will serve that which is best in me, not that which is most base_ , she chanted inside herself as she summoned up more power.

It was a harder fight than she felt like it should have been. She was weary from the climb and she felt the bitter cold of the frost magic more than usual.

And, well, she felt some chagrin. She'd seen that resting in the Fade could summon up a sloth demon. This was such a foreseeable chain of events that it was embarrassing even to contemplate.

But damned if she was going to die in the Fade because of a couple of stupid desire demons flashing their tits at her.

"Oops," Hawke crowed as a bolt of spirit magic seized through one of the desire demons and it was flung backward. Hawke ran forward a few paces, planting her staff hard against the frigid stone of the mountain, and swung out with both feet, planting her boots in the demoniac torso. It flew backward, off balance, and its scream faded into nothing as it rolled down the mountainside.

"Lost your friend," Hawke told the remaining desire demon. She was pretty sure demons didn't actually have friends; they didn't really seem like the _friendly_ type. It shrieked outrage at her anyway, and she grinned at it like a maniac. 

She destroyed the second of the two finally in a shower of shattered ice, kicking the remains of its body hard until fragments of it skittered down the mountainside after the first corpse. 

Then, plopping down in front of the sad remnants of her little fire, Hawke dropped her staff to the ground and dragged her hands back through the short fluff of her hair, twisting to tug at the roots in intense frustration.

"Fuck," she said, "I _hate_ Fade stuff."

***

In the distance, the wound in the sky was a scar that shimmered like a blue-green aurora. The Breach was sealed. The world would heal. The ravages of war continued to wreak havoc on the land, but the mythic threat of a world being devoured from without was ended. 

Et cetera, Anders thought. _And so on._

He searched inside himself for a feeling other than gloom about this.

Anders had dimly entertained the hope that the rifts that pocked the sky throughout Fereldan and Orlais were going to be their best chance to somehow use the power at Skyhold to draw Hawke back out again. With the Breach sealed, it seemed a dimmer chance, somehow.

Of course, on the other hand, as Isabela pointed out: the Inquisition saved the world, though!

"Yaay," Anders muttered.

"You know," Isabela said as she poked at her dinner with a stick, "I don't see what all the fuss is about roast nug. I can't say I really enjoy it."

Fenris wordlessly passed her the salt. 

Isabela brightened, and pinched some of it out over her portion of roasted meat. Murdering small cave dwellers from a distance had been Anders's dubious contribution to their journey for the day. The fresh meat was, at least, different from the endless rations of salt fish and dried fruit that they had brought with them from Gwaren, three days ago now. Bad food was nothing new to Anders, but it probably wasn't anything new to either of the other two either. Sometimes he suspected that Isabela just liked having something to complain about.

"I'm going to ... go for a walk," Anders said.

"Anders!" Isabela flung her arm dramatically across her face, leaning back against her rock. "We walked all day! All we did was walk! I found a dozen rocks in my boot."

"Let him," Fenris said, which annoyed Anders, because it meant that the reason he didn't have to explain was ... well, Fenris.

"Fine," sighed Isabela. "Don't get caught by anybody nasty, then. -- A dozen!" she added. "You _know_ , Fenris, if you were very sweet, you would offer to rub my feet."

Anders walked away while Fenris stoically chewed. Isabela would probably have gotten her way by the time he came back. Assuming he came back. The two of them were wearing on him. Just being within reach of Fenris made the rage pressure seem to build faster.

The mountains seemed so far to the west. He thought about trying a Fade summoning right here, not for the first time, but the thing is that if that was going to work, it would have worked the last time he tried it. (It hadn't -- they'd gotten to kill some shrieking monsters and Fenris had threatened to brain him.) 

When he'd gone some distance away, he found the peace and quiet of solitude beneath the rising stone of a cliff face, and sat against it with his back against the stone, breathing in the night. Carefully, he tried to feel something.

"We're coming, Hawke," he said softly.

He tried to know it. It was hard.

In the end, despite whatever deep aggravation had lain between them (among other things), she'd spared him. In the end, she'd fought for their fellow mages, and let him fight for the mages, too. But the mages had known him for what he'd done, and many of them hadn't thanked him for it.

He could no longer hear the siren call of complacency and found that it baffled and angered him.

Now, though, as the war had waged on, as new sources of order came about that seemed friendlier to the mages' cause, he still had all this anger. He wasn't causeless. There were too many things wrong. Each individual mage death, each individual templar abuse, all of them ate at him like maggots feeding on a dead horse.

So to speak.

"We can't go on like this," he murmured to the cool Fereldan night, but this time, _we_ didn't include Fenris or Isabela, and he didn't really think he counted as a _we_ anymore. Not really. 

Anders found that he was wondering how far they were from Lake Calenhad. It seemed so long since the last time he'd escaped from there.

What was he escaping from now?


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to rozzingit and teztime.

Day and night were meaningless in the Fade, but there was something about the climb that had become like the long dark midnight that never ended, at least inside her own head. It was a little unfair, Hawke felt, that she was cursedly awake in the midst of a world of dreams, feeling like it was two o'clock in the morning and she was staring at the ceiling contemplating her own mortality.

The way up the mountain had grown impassably steep. She'd tried blasting her way into the rock but it had proven remarkably resistant, and in the midst of frustration and exhaustion it suddenly occurred to Hawke that she probably should not cause an avalanche on her mountain path. 

So it was that she was now going _around_ obstacles instead of through them. 

"It's so not my style," Hawke muttered to her staff.

That wasn't really true. For every problem she'd bashed or solved, there was another she'd avoided. Glaring over her shoulder at the steepening stone, she smashed her staff hard against the frost-hard ground and walked on. It was still upward progression. Just ... slower.

The wind whistled in her ears and clawed at her armor. She squinted up into the endless green sky in a complete muddle of time. How long had she been walking? She had been peckish before, and now mostly felt a strange lassitude, seeped bone-deep beneath the cold, a faint dizziness fogging her thoughts from time to time before she banished it with an effort of will. It wasn't that she was a stranger to deprivation. Privilege had come to her later in life. It was just that it had been kind of a long time.

Hawke grunted as she climbed over an outcropping of stone to reach a higher angled path that seemed to run further up the mountain towards what looked like a small plateau on the way to the peak above. It shimmered with ice and her boots scraped and scrabbled over its surface as she worked. About halfway up, she slipped and fell, rolling down the uneven surface to flatten herself into a dark mucky blend of snow, ice and mud.

She groaned a little, but did not stop; she just hauled herself back up and tried again.

Really, she'd been _going around_ problems for years. Her whole life, avoiding problems. First she'd fled the Templars. Then she'd fled the Blight. Then she'd fled mercenary work, although that had more to do with a few issues she'd had with _authority_ , and, well, criminality wasn't entirely the issue but it wasn't _not_ the issue. She'd wanted better in life than to be a dumb thug, even if she had been a dumb thug with smart mouth, and one of the best. 

At its core, she'd sought money and standing as just another escape. From poverty, yes, and in honor of her family, sure, but what she'd really been doing was _avoiding the issue_. Anders had called her on it, again and again. Of course, he'd done so in the midst of being self-righteous about _literally everything_ so it had been fairly easy to not take him seriously . . . 

She'd been a hypocrite, coasting on fresh gold and ancestral privilege and the ability to make friends. He'd said so all along, and it wasn't that he'd been wrong, but she'd always castigated him for being such an asshole about it.

Had he ever really tricked her? No. She couldn't think that he had. Not really. Not in her heart of hearts. The answers were all there, if she'd opened her eyes and looked at them. She hadn't wanted to see. She hadn't wanted to know. 

Then as now, she avoided it.

Hawke's nostrils flared as she fumed a long breath past closed lips. Then she turned around and started back the way she had come, toward the initial slope of the path. Sliding down the rocks, she landed on her knees and hauled herself back up to her feet again. 

If she'd just faced it head on, maybe there would be fewer dead in Kirkwall. 

Maybe her mother would live.

There was a hard truth, wasn't there. If only she had fought harder for the dead, pursued the apostate faster, if only years hadn't passed between deaths, if only she had done differently, Leandra would still be alive instead of wrecked into ghastly pieces.

Hawke's fingers tightened on her staff. The tears were stinging her eyes now, years later, tears of helplessness and rage as much as grief.

There was so much she should have done differently, and so many outcomes that she should have been able to prevent. 

Bethany should still be alive. Carver should never have been Blighted; he shouldn't even now be squirreled away in hiding wherever Aveline and Fenris and Merrill had plotted to take him. Not that the Templars were faring much better in the war that racked Thedas than the Grey Wardens had, but--

_Corypheus_ , although Hawke didn't know what she should have done about that one. That had been one corpsely-looking corpse. How could she have known?

Did it matter?

There were so many mistakes. Even defending her fellow mages from the Rite of Annulment at Kirkwall, she should have been able to keep more of them alive, to keep more of them from resorting to demons in the fighting. She should have been able to do _something_.

And Anders--

She should never have trusted him. She should have realized. She should have stopped it.

Hawke stood before the impossibly steep slope before her and stared up at it. It looked like a singularly stupid thing to try and climb. It looked like the kind of quest that nobody embarked on. It looked like she would probably break her neck even trying.

She should have helped him. 

That was the real thing. The false ritual he'd conjured up to get her help -- that should have been her focus. Something to free Anders from Justice, or Justice from Anders. Spirit magic. Tevinter magic. Old magic. Even Merrill's occasionally delusional-seeming intentness on her damn bloody weird elf mirror seemed better, in retrospect, than Hawke's own weaselling around the issues that really mattered. In a hindsight littered with the corpses of thousands and the flying shrapnel of a detonated chantry, anyway.

It could have saved so many innocents. And not just innocents. It could have saved her friend. From his mistakes, from his own compassion, and his own damned fool heart.

Maybe the war that followed was inevitable. But surrendering to fate -- _that_ was never Hawke's style.

Hawke studied the slope, and started etching a magical symbol against the frosted ground before her. She created more frost, and then started chipping away at it, forming it into long, hard ledges of ice. She formed pitons out of more ice, until she was drained and sweaty with the effort, and the sweat seemed to freeze on her brow. Flipping her staff against her back, she took her makeshift weapons of ice and drove them hard against the rock.

Carefully, slowly, muscles already whining at her about the unaccustomed effort even as the process began, Hawke approached the impossible rock face and began to climb it.

***

"I think those mountains are lying to us," Isabela said.

The Frostbacks loomed up in the distance, mighty and shadowed and half-wreathed in cloud. Their horses clopped at a slow, mellow pace over the road. Fenris did not enjoy the horse. He did not enjoy its distinctly horsey smell, or its distinctly horsey attitude, nor the way its saddle required him to sit. The first day on the horse had been very painful the second day. Although he had said nothing, he was still harboring a grudge about it.

As they drew nearer to the foothills and encountered more relief efforts from the Inquisition, they spent more and more time off the road, cutting through forests and splashing through cold streamlets. Anders was able to lead them through a lot of the territory nearest Lake Calenhad, with a surprising memory for landmarks and geography for all that any old caches that he might have remembered about were long since picked over by apostates at war.

The horses had been salvaged from the ruin of a templar camp that had clearly been hit by mages so demon-ridden and mad that they hadn't thought to take anything with them. Isabela had found, rooting around in the camp, a chest of heirloom jewelry that did not seem appropriate to a war camp of any kind, particularly one attached to a holy order. 

Anders had gone off about war crimes for awhile and Fenris had scouted ahead to avoid listening to him. He'd found the horses, wandering loose in amongst the trees. One of them had been remarkably friendly even after it had discovered he was disappointingly without horse food upon his person. He'd ceded the friendly one, and its accompanying slobber, to Isabela. 

Isabela didn't like the horses either; they were without mastheads, sails, sailors, and other accompaniments an admiral required generally for travel in comfort. However, it was saving them time, or at least, changing the pattern of their toil and effort across Fereldan overland toward the Orlesian border.

Either Fenris had missed Anders answering Isabela, or Isabela was just continuing on without regard to either of them speaking; she said, "They don't seem to be getting a handsbreadth nearer. Who creates a landlocked center of power and authority? Landlocked! It _would_ take a Qunari, wouldn't it?"

"She is Tal-Vashoth," Fenris murmured.

"It's all the same knot-headed nonsense, isn't it?" Isabela said.

"It's the Inquisition. It's basically an arm of the Chantry," Anders said. "I know you make it a great point of pride to never pay attention to anything--"

"I do." Isabela smiled brightly at him across the pommel of her saddle as she leaned forward, and pulled her hat down over her eyes. "We all know that, don't we?"

"So, no, it's not all the same nonsense," Anders said. "It's different nonsense. Completely different Andrastian nonsense."

"Still knot-headed, though," Isabela said. She knocked on the side of her head with a fist, and then reclaimed her reins as the horse pranced and snorted uncertainly in the shift of her balance. "Landlocked," she sighed.

Fenris was about to say something, but instead he drew rein and halted, rising in his stirrup as he looked to the north. There was a crossroads up ahead, and the dry-caked mud of the road stretched off in several directions, but there were uneven stone cliffs and scraggly pinewoods spotting intermittently to either side of them, partly obscuring the high curve of the north road from view. Still, he thought he heard--

"Someone's coming," he said. "Get off the road. Keep pace and we'll meet again at the Redcliffe Road crossing."

Anders didn't bother to complain. He turned his horse, except that it started balking, snorting and stamping in the mud. "Errgh," he muttered, struggling to control the animal.

Isabela said, "Grand," as she looked off in the direction Fenris indicated. "Are you sure? I don't--"

"Just go," Fenris snarled in exasperation, grabbing the reins of Anders's horse as the mage failed entirely to get it to go in the right direction. 

Anders leapt from the horse, stumbled on impact with the ground, and pitched forward into a roll through the smeary earth. Fenris permitted himself the tiniest of tiny smiles, and nobly restrained the urge to ride his horse over the flailing mage in the mud.

Isabela snorfled into a little chortling laugh. "Oh," she said, "there they are."

There were four other horses rounding the curve of the north road. In the distance, Fenris thought he could make out curving horns.

He glanced back again and Anders, despite his particularly ridiculous-looking false start, had already somehow vanished into the surrounding undergrowth. Fenris found himself mildly surprised; only by glancing at the smashed grooves in the near-mud under the hooves of their horses could he guess at Anders's direction.

"So what do you suppose we have this one for?" Fenris asked Isabela with a jerk of his chin at the horse he was now, apparently, leading.

"Lost his rider to bandits we met on the road," Isabela answered promptly. She laid her hand over her heart. "It was very sad."

"Ah," Fenris said, enlightened. "Come on, you," he said. He was not good with steering both horses at once. Finally, he leapt down from his beast to lead both of them instead, one coiled set of reins around each of his hands. He landed lightly on his feet and urged them forward with a muttered noise half-swallowed in his throat.

Isabela rode ahead toward the crossroads and then cantered back toward him, her lips pursed together as she let out a long, low whistle.

"Good thing you got rid of him, Fenris," she said.

They had been bound to encounter those tabards sooner or later. The paired Qunari giants riding at the front of the group were unexpected, though.

"It's her," Fenris said, not quite a question. 

After all, how many Tal-Vashoth would ride at the head of a team of Inquisition scouts?

***

Hawke's body was screaming with an exhaustion purely physical when she reached the crown of the rock. Her hands felt frozen through her gloves, with tiny spicules of ice biting pain like thin needles through her skin. She trembled, and she wasn't sure how much was the cold and how much was muscles about to give out from their long abuse. But she hauled herself up the viciously angled slope and reached, at the top of the cliff, a deep fissure in the rock's face that became the hollow of a cave. 

When she finally reached it, she crumpled to the ground, and peeled off the gloves to rub her hands together and then rub them against the sides of her face, trying to bring feeling other than pain and cold into her skin, to shock them alive with the heat of friction. 

She was kneeling there scrubbing her hands and huffing the heat of her breath onto them when she was hit by a blast of frost magic that sent her reeling.

She rolled, fumbling for her staff.

"You've _got_ to be _kidding me_ ," she snarled, as she stared into the dark figure of the despair demon that shimmered with a bright aura of ice and magic as it emerged from the cave. Behind it, Hawke could see the cave opening to a wider fissure, climbing further up and further in, and she could see thin-gleaming beams of green light to show that the sky peeked inside.

The despair demon said nothing. It conjured more ice and fired it into Hawke's chest like an arrow. It slammed into her and she rolled further until she hit the stone wall of the cave. Pain and cold seemed like her entire world for a moment, and she thought she might black out.

Of all the ways she could die today, Hawke decided, it would not be this way.

She was not going to die to despair.

"Oh no you don't!" she shouted at the demon as its hands passed through the air, beginning to summon more magic. She blasted a gout of flame from her staff, spun it over her head and swept more flame to follow, falling into a rapid rhythm of fire and lightning that lit the cave walls in a shining brilliance of orange and gold and brilliant blue. 

The demon wailed and fought hard, summoning defensive magic to diminish the heat as it fled away from her and deeper into the cave, but Hawke advanced on it. As the demon died, shimmering wraiths floated, reflecting eerily against pillars of rock and shimmering crystal in amidst the probably geologically impossible mountain. Exhausted and furious, Hawke blasted them to shreds of nothing with her magic.

When the fight was done, Hawke was alone in the weird gloom of the cave, her back to a pillar of crystal, and her head rested back against it, her eyes half-closed as she panted in weariness.

"Take that," she muttered. She closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, there was a nug peering at her. It was small, squat and fat, chewing on something with curious eyes, like something that had no fear.

"I'd be tempted to kill and eat you if I didn't think you were a lost soul or something," she told the nug.

The nug quivered. It snuffled its little nuggy nose. It said, "Thanks."

Hawke sat up. "Are you--? A lost soul? Or something?"

She looked into the shiny black eyes and found them incomprehensible. How was she sitting here talking to a nug. _I hate Fade stuff_ , she thought vehemently. _Have I mentioned that I hate Fade stuff?_

"Or something," said the nug. It chewed a little more, and then combed its whiskers with tiny hands. Who knew on what. What did nugs eat? Didn't they eat deep mushrooms?

"I swear," she said, "this is the longest day of my life."

"You could die, if you wanted," the nug observed. It sat up on its haunches, looking at her. "As you killed that corrupted spirit, you could die instead." 

"No, thanks." Hawke smeared her hand over her face and then dragged it back through the dark scruff of her hair.

"It was a spirit once, you know," the nug said. It hopped across the rocks to stand on the cave floor before Hawke, shimmering faintly in a pool of green light from the yawning mouth above and at a diagonal. "A spirit of bright things. It liked the beginning of the day for what it would bring. It liked its name," the nug added. "Before it was corrupted. Before it lost what it was."

"What's," Hawke started to ask, and then cleared her throat. "Excuse me, but I feel like I've had kind of a _lot_ of cryptic lately, so if you don't mind -- who are you?"

"Not important," the nug said in a peculiarly distant tone. It looked off into the middle distance for a moment, combing its whiskers again. "But you're nearly there. That might be important."

The next time Hawke blinked, the nug was gone. In its place, there were some very incongruous strawberries. They looked like dream fruit, plump and gleaming impossibly in the refractions of light off the crystals. 

It was a little while spent staring and brooding uncertainly over the vagaries of gifts from the Fade before Hawke decided not to care whether it was safe to eat them.

She wasn't sure if it was real food, or if it could sustain her real body, but it was the warmest, earthiest, sweetest fruit she had ever put in her mouth. They were good enough strawberries to cause serious swearing.

Somehow, in the weird Fade light peeking into the creepy cave from the strange sky above, Hawke thought they tasted a little like hope.

***

Anders fled between rocky outcrops, finding one that was brown and half caked in the same mud that had gotten all over his robes, and crouching behind it in its shadow. It was pretty much the same whenever anyone was coming on the road, and this was little different except that there wasn't a great deal of warning. For large parts of their journey, they'd simply avoided the road entirely, but with the horses, the road became more expedient. 

None of them were better than mediocre riders. Anders had had truck with horses in the past, because he'd managed just about every conceivable human method of _escape_ in the course of his charming career as a fugitive, but Isabela was an admiral (or something), and apparently for all the fleeing Fenris had done, he had eschewed horses, or just hadn't been able to scrounge them up.

The point being, while ahorse, they were getting nowhere in terrain like this if they weren't following the roads.

When Anders peeked around the crags in the rocks and caught sight of the gleaming armor of one of the riders, he didn't need to wait any longer than that. He broke away from his hiding place to head deeper into the scraggly woods, to where there was more cover and better hiding places. This was no false alarm. Whoever they were, the bright armor smacked of authority, and the Chantry, and generally people who would arrest him on sight. 

Or execute him.

Or try to execute him and summon up enough of his wrath to destroy themselves. 

Anders sucked a breath through his teeth, dodging around a tree and picking up more speed. He needed to stay close enough to the others that he could track them once the strangers were gone, but without staying close enough to put himself at risk of capture.

Not today. Not now. If there ever was a time he'd ready, it wasn't now. He wasn't even sure if he could rescue Hawke, but he saw no pathway whatsoever for the mage-hating bastard and the vehemently careless and probably drunk pirate to do so without him. 

The dead haunted him, but the living needed him.

For a moment he felt on fire with a resentment whose direction he found hard to aim. As he moved through the trees, a low hanging branch slapped across his face like a whipcrack, and he stumbled. When he flung up his hand to catch himself, pale fingers closed around his arm.

"Careful," said a soft voice.

Anders looked up into a pale face he was sure had not been there before, panic pounding his heart with sudden speed. The face was young, straw-colored hair falling around it, though the youth's features were obscured by a hat so enormous and ridiculous it made Isabela's pretensions to the admiralty look like sensible fashion.

Fear and rage gripped Anders together and he tried to fight them off. The boy hadn't been there. There had been no one there.

"It's all right," said the youth. "Let me help."

He lifted his head, and for a moment, Anders could see his eyes, despite the broad brim of the hat and the obscuring fall of the pale hair. Something struck him to the heart, a terror that he could not understand, edged by an edge of harsh contempt that he didn't realize was there until he heard it in his voice when he snapped, "Get away from me."

The youth took a single step back, continuing to watch him. He said, "So much vengeance, so much hate, hot as steel, cruel as fire, melting faces, I can see all the faces, cowards, hypocrites, I'll destroy all of them, everything wrong, nothing is right, nothing can be right, never again."

There was intensity in the words he spoke, and they seemed to clang against Anders, as if each was ripped out of his memory. "Demon," he said. He stared at the youth. He didn't really look like a demon. Then again, Anders didn't look like an abomination. Appearances could be deceptive, when creatures of the Fade were very powerful. Couldn't they. 

"No," said the youth. "Not yet. Not likely. Not now." He smiled faintly, a pale, private smile, for someone else, or for himself. He lifted his hand, held it out, palm up. "So much hurt," he said.

Somehow with a certainty that he had no idea the source of, Anders drew himself straight and said, "No. Not demon."

"I'm sinking," the youth said softly, in a voice of terrible pity. "It's choking me. My anger. My vengeance. My lives. Destroyed, drowning, damned, despair, I'm drowning in it, make it stop, I can't make it stop, is there anything left? How can there be anything left? I have to. There has to be."

"Stop this," Anders said, except that he was shouting it, his voice had ripped out of his throat like a scream for mercy. 

"There can be," the youth said. He took a step forward, his hand held out. "It's all right."

"No," Anders said. He backed away from the youth, whose face now seemed to him like he saw it with others eyes, burning with a terrible inward light, as though his skin should have been riddled with cracks to reveal the power within, but instead he contained it and owned it, as should never have been possible. He backed away until he felt himself hitting one of the trees behind him. "You don't understand," he said. 

"Tell me," he suggested, and again he smiled, this time a quiet, knowing smile that said he completely understood.

And of course he did. He was speaking the echoes of Anders's own mind. He could hear them shattering his defenses even as they stood there. Anders scrambled for composure, for reaction, for anything. He scrambled for the protection that might come if he called forth the full power of vengeance, except that when he looked at the faint smile on the youth's face, and the weird not-glow that Anders's not-sight was seeing, and Anders knew that somehow this boy brought forth everything about him that was Justice merely by standing there. 

Sifting past the rage. Finding what lay beneath. Laying it bare.

"After what I have done," Anders said, with a fierce vehemence, driven by the only clarity he felt was left to him, "after everything I've broken and destroyed and ruined, I don't _deserve_ compassion."

The youth took both of his hands. His skin was a little cool to the touch. He lowered his head, ducking it so that the broad brim of his hat obscured his face, but the quiet smile was plain to hear in his voice when he answered, "Yet here it is."


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this took so long! I'm still working on the fic, it's just that I also have a new job that takes up a lot more of my time than the old one. Who knew lawyering took so much time?? You can thank teztime and rozzingit for cracking the whip on me getting it written! :)

The snow was pristine under Hawke's boots, a pure white lent an eerie tinge by the misty green of the sky. The air was cold and thin, so that each steamy breath she released seemed to cost her more air. Each stride now had to be supported by the stamp of her staff into the crunch of snow underfoot, because between the incline and the air, she did not quite trust her legs to the struggle alone.

Climbing out of the cave and into the brilliant light of the open Fade had taken effort, but Hawke hadn't stopped to rest once she pierced into the day, because whatever nourishment she'd drawn from the meal she'd made of the fruit, it wasn't going to last forever. Exertion warred with the frigid air, making it hard to tell whether she was uncomfortably cold, overly warm, or some bizarre amalgam of both at once. 

The mountains stretched out in all directions. Peaks seemed to surge up around the mountain she climbed in icy, greenish echo of the Frostbacks, or some other mountain range made up of human imaginings, the ridged spine of the world from ocean to ocean. 

Hawke had long since stopped trying to track time, because it was meaningless. Something about the world around her had the sharp crispness of morning -- the razor bite of the air, the sharp relief of color as though night's dark had only just been chased away. She squinted against the glow of green light off snow on the mountain peak she faced as she came to the curving edge of a cliff. 

Demons moved like distant specks of bright fire and ice, changing shimmers of hue that seemed to vanish again as she watched them. They were too far away for her to even think about fighting. She wondered if there was another dreamer, tortured and gnawed at by corrupt spirits on the distant ridges of the mountain top, and then remembered again that she wasn't a dreamer. 

Hawke turned away from the distant spectacle. Just this once, she was going to have to let that be somebody else's problem. 

Her path narrowed, became a thin ledge of stone, and then dropped off into what looked like a gap in the snow. Each stake of her staff into the snow until it bit earth or stone beneath seemed more vital.

Climbing carefully along the path toward snowy ridge of stone ahead of her, Hawke glanced down the angled pinnacle of rock she was edging out across, and saw a lot of potential for her own death. When she looked up again, the crest of the mountain seemed so much closer than it had been before, but she couldn't quite see how her path was supposed to lead there. She edged carefully out onto the ridge of the outcrop, balancing with staff held aloft in one hand and her other hand extended and wobbling for balance.

"If only instead of spending all of that time studying magic with Bethany I'd followed up on that brilliant scheme to run away and join the circus," Hawke muttered under her breath, peeking down the steep depths that dropped away beside her and the near-certain doom that almost beckoned.

She came to the end of the gap and stood there, balancing as she looked across. She couldn't quite measure it by eye, but she thought she could make it. It would be easier with a running start. She didn't think she could manage a running start up here on this ledge.

Hawke closed her eyes, and thought a very hard prayer to the Maker, to Andraste, and perhaps to anybody else out there who might look out for fools and the ridiculous. 

Then she opened her eyes and leapt across the gap.

She was in the air and she wasn't going to make it. Breath of a scream caught in her throat, she spun wildly with her staff, smashing hard into the rock of the cliff she couldn't reach. Heart hammering in her chest, she looked down and saw that she was suspended by her grip on the staff, her feet kicking out over a two hundred foot drop. 

Squinting ahead of her against the glare of greenish sunlight off snow and darker rock, Hawke saw that the only reason she was alive right now was that she had somehow managed to wedge her staff into the grip of the stones, its end ground deep between two pinching fingers of near-black stone.

"Oh," Hawke heard her own voice say in a thin, strangled voice, as she dangled from both hands wrapped tight around the staff, "this is good."

***

"Ahoy the Inquisitor!"

Isabela stood astride her horse, balancing in the stirrups with her knee-high boots angled inward toward the animal's flanks. Watching her, Fenris squelched his toes a little in the cool mud. His head tilted slightly to one side as his glance swept from Isabela to the incoming party of Inquisition tabards, he led the other two horses at the side of the rode at an ambling and unconcerned pace.

_Nothing to see here_ , Fenris thought. _We are very subtle._

He could see the Inquisition party murmuring to each other, but not hear them. The two Tal-Vashoth at the head of the party rode forward; the heavily armored woman with the brightest gleaming Inquisition symbol on her shield and breastplate, however, was dismounting from her horse, easing it with gentle persuasion in her hands. She was wary and tense, as if what she was expecting was not so much a friendly encounter on the road as, say, an ambush.

Fair enough.

"Boss," Fenris heard one Tal-Vashoth say to the other in a low, accented murmur, "that's an Admiral's hat."

"I can see that, Bull," said the Inquisitor. She rode forward a few paces more and then drew up rein, surveying them both with bright-alert eyes. Her hair was dark red, twisted knots of braid pulled back, while her horns swept forward in a curving arc. Her mouth quirked. She lacked the immediate tension of the knight behind her, and her bodyguard seemed very alert, but in a very relaxed way.

"You have me at a disadvantage there," she said, lifting her chin. 

"I understand you saved the world not too long ago," Isabela said. She lifted her hand to doff her hat, and then swept it low as she shook back her dark hair, smiling. "I'll tip my cap to you, then." 

"But what have you done for us lately," muttered the bodyguard.

"Thanks," the Inquisitor said with the bright flicker of a grin across her expression. 

"We're but humble travelers," Isabela said, glancing aside at Fenris with a slight widening of her eyes like she was trying to encourage him to say something useful and helpful.

Fenris glared at her a little, and then looked up at the others. He noticed that they also had a horse moseying without a rider a few lengths back from the main party.

"Very humble," he agreed.

Isabela made a face at him. Fenris didn't think it was subtle.

"Admiral?" The armored woman strode forward. "Admiral Isabela? Inquisitor, I know these two, their descriptions have been--"

"It wasn't me," Isabela said, sitting up straight on the horse, "and you can't prove a thing."

Fenris cleared his throat. "Isabela--"

" _Admiral Isabela_ ," breathed Inquisitor Adaar, her teeth catching her lower lip as she looked between them. 

"And Fenris," said the knight. She nodded to him gravely, her lips thinning with some internal pressure as she glanced across the distance between them. He almost thought the expression in her eyes might have been sympathy, obscured only slightly by the hard lines of her face and the edge of a jaw that could probably break down doors.

Fenris pretended not to have made any eye contact. He said, "Ah," and settled his weight back on his heels, easing into a more casual stance as he narrowed his gaze between them. "We can thank Varric for this, I'm sure."

"Oh, Varric." Isabela sighed. "Then I suppose it was me," she said, and winked at the knight, "but you still can't prove a thing."

The knight snorted. "You can thank Varric for a lot of things," she said.

"I almost wish we'd found you sooner," the Inquisitor said, and smiled. "I understand you've been hunting slavers. If you're here to help weed out the last holdouts of the Venatori, I'm sure the Inquisition would welcome your aid."

"Vint-killing recreationally, eh?" Her bodyguard smiled, too, and Fenris felt himself measured with a particular glance.

"Not exactly," Fenris said. He glanced at Isabela.

"We were actually on our way to see you, but not for that," Isabela said. She wedged her hat firmly back atop her head. "You can consider us creditors of Master Tethras. Oh, friendly ones, of course, sweet thing." 

"He sent us ... news," Fenris said with a slight nod, uncertain of how much Isabela intended to reveal, and what they were going to do about Anders in the long run _anyway_.

"Yes," the Inquisitor said. She lowered her head, the crown of her horns angling toward the ground, and then slid from her horse. Standing straight and tall, she dwarfed both of them as any Qunari giant might. "I am sorry," she said. "I wish I could have met you under better circumstances. Hawke saved us. I owe her much."

"It's what she does," Isabela said with a softer smile than usual.

Fenris stood on the precipice of truth and falsehood and had no idea what to say. Finally, he just swallowed and said nothing. Isabela wasn't wrong.

"Saved us, saved him, even from himself," said an eerie young voice from the trees behind them. "Saved everyone. It's what she does. It's what she'll do again."

Fenris turned and stood, dumbfounded for a very different reason as the idiot mage walked out of the trees behind a thin boy with a giant hat.

"If I have anything to say about it," Anders said.

Which was when all hell broke loose. 

***

Hawke dangled by her grip on the staff and felt herself slowly sliding down it, pulled by her own weight, until she kicked wildly, suspended in midair, trying desperately to get her boots onto stone and enough purchase to not die. 

That was when a great quaking rumble began in the mountainside. Stone and snow began tumbling, chips of rock and dust and snow burst over her where she hung by her own weight from the long bar of her staff.

Hawke drew breath to scream, or possibly to say something stupid; it didn't matter, because she got a throat full of dust and ended up coughing and choking, clutching desperately with her eyes scrunched shut, and then there was a sudden horrible sensation of motion around her. 

She opened her eyes to realize she had just been thrown, end over end and head over heels, to land flat on her back higher up the path, saved from death by gravity by the prospect of a new death. A demon had surged into being, coalescing out of smoke and dust and stone into a hugely massed and armored seeming figure.

It was a pride demon, but it bore an unwieldy sized hammer that blazed with green fire.

Hawke forced herself up onto her elbows, scanning rapidly around for her staff. It was nowhere to be seen. She wasn't a hundred percent weaponless without it -- there was a dagger in her boot, sure, and she could always try summoning power without the focus of the staff to wield it, but she was drastically disadvantaged.

The demon laughed at her.

"Glib little hero," it said. "Lost your tongue?"

"No, I've got that right here," Hawke said. She rolled the rest of the way to her knees, looking everywhere now, not for her staff, but for anything that she could use as a weapon, anything that she could improvise.

"I was concerned," said the pride demon. 

"I know, I'd hate to disappoint you." Hawke pushed herself to her feet. She pulled out the dagger, not because there was much she could do with it against the armored mass of the demon, but because she could at least use it for its grip against the cliff wall if she needed to. 

The demon stood between her and the cliff. The mountain path that she needed to traverse was at her back. She could turn around and walk away, leave the demon at her back and just keep going. 

 

But then she wouldn't have a weapon. Not a real one, anyway.

"Do you need some help?" The demon asked the question cordially, which was in itself just altogether irritating.

"Not from you," Hawke said. She edged forward toward the demon and the cliff, hoping to at least get close enough to get a glimpse below and see how far down her staff was. 

The demon met her with the shift of its weight, huge and massive and walling her off from the cliff face. "You've already taken my help," it said. "Unless you wanted to fall from this mountainside."

Hawke said nothing to this. She knew better than to admit to any level of beholden to a demon; she smiled at it, instead, and spun her dagger thoughtfully in her hand. If she could summon a raw blast of force she could smash through the grip of the stone that held her staff, assuming it was still there. But without the staff to channel her power, it might not be enough ... and she'd have one shot, really, because then there'd be a real chance she'd be weaponless before the demon she was working so hard to offend.

The demon watched her, and watched how her advance stopped a few paces away, the dagger a light weight in her hand.

Hawke said, "Sorry, was that a friendly overture? I must have missed it."

"But we both know there's really only one person you'd really accept help from," the demon said in a murmur that carried with it the shiver of a laugh. It shifted its weight, and in the next moment, Hawke saw that she was looking at her own self. The demon stood, hip cocked, smirk ready on her own lips, with the massive weight of the green-burning hammer slung up jauntily against her shoulder.

"Do you really think these head games are going to work?" Hawke asked in a particularly bored tone. She strode closer to her doppelganger, insouciant and unimpressed.

"What is it that makes you immune?" wondered the Hawke demon with an altogether too familiar smirk.

Hawke adopted a musing expression, as if considering the question, as she summoned up inside herself as much magic as she could conjure here in the Fade, staffless and without fresh lyrium. She could feel power prickling against her skin, and knew the demon could sense it too, because there was a brilliant hunger gleaming in the demon's stolen expression.

"It's my mysterious charm," Hawke said, and then slashed open her own palm. The power beat through her with the course of her heartbeat, singing sudden strength in her veins and splattering brilliant and stark against the snow. Raw force ripped from beneath and sent snow and rock flying up around them.

For a terrifying second Hawke thought that it had all been for nothing, and the bright triumph glowed at her in the demon's eyes as it raised up its hammer in hands that looked like hers.

Then her staff spun down to stake itself in the snow behind the demon. Grinning like a bleeding maniac, Hawke closed her fist and smashed the image of her face with it. It was like punching the craggy armor of the pride demon, but it had its intended effect; the demon was, however momentarily, startled.

Hawke ran, dripping blood over the snow, and snatched up her staff. It was very cold to the touch, and seemed to threaten to bite frost through her skin, into her blood. It hurt to touch it. Closing her eyes, she lifted it, spun, and blasted hot, rage-fueled fire against the edge of the cliff.

When she opened her eyes again, the demon had reverted to its true form, and it was scrambling for purchase on a cliff's edge that was suddenly slick with molten snow and cracking stone. Hawke heard herself cackling as she whirled her staff in the air and then smashed it down into the rock, blasting the struggling demon with the full force of lightning. She felt power coursing through her as heady as good brandy and she knew what she was feeling was the risk that she'd been warned of all her life. The next blast of lightning she called did not hit the demon, but smote the mountainside before it, cracking through the stone and breaking off the edge of the precipice.

As the demon fell down the immense drop she'd almost lost herself down, Hawke dropped to a knee and rested her forehead against the staff, which had lost its eerie chill and the bright blaze of fireball heat both, and said, "Don't worry," in a voice as soft as breath. "I've got this." 

Even her father had turned to blood magic, when there was no other choice. She'd seen how he'd conquered it. To use that much power invariably summoned demons and other nasty crawling things from the darker recesses of the Fade. Years after his death she had witnessed how he'd bound them. She'd held the chanted litany in her heart ever since she and Carver had walked that ancient prison together. 

Now, having used the forbidden arts in the heart of the realm of demons, she waited kneeling in the snow for a long time, expecting to be set on by a fresh swarm of nasties.

After awhile, she said, "All right, come on, where are you? Bring on the shades and demons and the giant spiders."

But all was silent in the snowscape. Her blood was dribbling down the staff. The wind had settled; the snow had settled; the sky was green and seemed to stretch forever around her.

Finally Hawke rose, drew a long breath through her nose, and looked up toward the ridged peak of the mountain.

It wasn't too much further now. Summoning her strength once more, Hawke lowered her head and trudged on. 

***

The boy called himself Cole, and he offered compassion with both hands because it was his real name. Anders couldn't figure out what he was: a sense that was not his vision told him that he looked like a Fade thing made real, and no magic that Anders understood could let a Fade thing be made real. 

"These are my friends," he had said with complete confidence as he guided Anders back through the woods. "We will help."

Now, as Anders found himself standing on the very tips of his toes to avoid the very sharp edge of the tempered steel angled at his throat, he found that, perhaps, he should not have been so quick to trust in a Fade thing made real.

It wasn't that Compassion hadn't _meant_ to help him; it was just that it was maybe reasonable to assume that there were points of earthly existence that the spirit didn't get.

Like needing to not die.

"I can explain," Anders said.

"You can explain," said the Seeker in a voice like ice, "while you sit in your cell awaiting execution. Inquisitor, this man is both an apostate and a dangerous terrorist--"

"Boss..." the bodyguard said, his hand still resting on the haft of his battle-axe.

The magic seemed to have been sucked out of the very air surrounding him, cool fingers of pressure that prickled invisibly behind his neck and down his spine. She held him at bay in the middle of a dispel field, then, nonmagic an eerie pulsing tension that it would take considerable force to break through, and once he'd done that, he'd have attacked the Inquisition.

"I'm familiar with his actions, Cassandra," the Inquisitor said. "We all know who he is."

"And what he's done!" Cassandra insisted.

"Please," Anders said, "just give me a chance to--"

"Varric," sighed Isabela, with a knowing roll of her eyes toward the knight who currently had Anders under her blade. "Honestly, you don't really know what he's done. You probably know, oh, you know, an exaggerated two thirds, minus a lot of important context and necessary detail--"

"Wait," Cole said. For a moment he seemed gone, and then he was there again at Cassandra's elbow, his head lifted so he could stare into her face from beneath the broad flop of his hat. "Wait, we need to help, not hurt. This is important."

"No, Cole, we need to arrest this criminal," Cassandra said with fierce vehemence. She looked to Adaar. "You know how much blood he has to answer for!"

"Well--" the Inquisitor began, looking between her friends and the strangers.

Fenris made an exaggerated gesture of welcome with the broad sweep of his hand and said, "Don't let us stand in your way."

"Fenris!" Anders yelped. His hands held up, he glared as much murder as he could muster at the elf from behind sword-point. "Damn it! You know what I'm here to do!"

"I _don't_ know why you didn't stay _out of sight_ ," Fenris snarled But a heartbeat later he was at Anders's side, and his blade had come loose in his hands, the horses left behind. "I will regret this, Seeker," he said in a low, intense voice as he loomed close enough almost for Anders to feel the waking glow of heat in the lyrium that burned beneath his skin, "but I can't allow you to take the mage."

"Oh, balls," Isabela complained, standing in her stirrups and reaching for the hilts of her daggers. 

"How do you propose to stop me?" Cassandra demanded, as a woman fully ready to take on all three of them at once apparently.

"Step back," Fenris said in a voice more soft and sad than any he typically used as a threat. His weapon leapt forward to clash hers away from Anders's neck, and he interposed himself between the mage and her counterstrike as she lunged forward, shield thrust at his face. 

Moments later, the bodyguard was there, massive and pale and swinging an axe down that Fenris barely dodged, rolling out of the way and springing back to his feet as he lunged in a blaze of lyrium and speed at Cassandra, moving to knock aside her shield as Isabela danced inside the reach of the massive Tal-Vashoth to smash a vial against his chest.

"Yow," roared the Iron Bull. "What was that, woman?"

"Oopsy, clumsy me!" sang Isabela. "I can't believe I did that, trip over my own feet next--"

"Don't!" Cole shouted with surprising volume.

"We need to save Hawke!" Anders pleaded, trying to be heard over the clash of steel. He did not want to raise up magic against these people, not when they were his best chance of getting to Hawke and to the Fade. "Please, just let me save Hawke and then you can--" 

He'd meant to offer himself up in the aftermath. _Do whatever you want with me_ , he'd wanted to say, but the words caught in his throat, and he felt the rage building in his gut, rising from the core of himself, blazing through the dampening field the woman had laid across, or maybe it was just fading away. 

As if any of these people didn't have blood on their hands. As if any one among them could use the word _apostate_ without absurdity. As if this damned fool _Inquisitor_ and her little band of hangers-on weren't ultimately responsible for what had happened with Hawke.

He felt the torrent rising in him and he didn't realize when his staff had leapt into his hand. The power was swirling through him and out through his fingertips when suddenly Cole's hand had grasped his like a shock of heat against his skin, and he realized the Inquisitor had said something.

"Stand down," the Inquisitor said. "Cassandra! Back off or I swear to the Maker I will have Bull sit on you!"

"Uh, boss--" said the Iron Bull.

"Enough already!" said Adaar. She pointed at Anders and Cole. "Cole, you think we can help Hawke? You think Hawke needs help?"

"Yes!" Cole let go of Anders only to spin around behind him and shove him forward. Anders stumbled and slammed his staff into the mud, gripping it for balance.

"Uh," Anders said. "That's--"

"It's why we were coming." Isabela gave the Iron Bull a hand up from where she'd somehow knocked him into the mud, along with a sly grin. "You are a big one, aren't you?" she said.

"I've heard it told," the Bull answered her.

"Later," the Inquisitor suggested to both of them with a flattening hand-gesture. 

Fenris and Cassandra had stopped. The gleaming paint of her shield had several new chips in it and the elf was sporting the beginnings of a new bruise blossoming along the line of his jaw, but neither had been seriously injured in the brief flourish of combat before Adaar had put a stop to it.

Cassandra put her shield up and pointed at Anders with her blade. "We will discuss this again," she said, before sheathing it.

"Hawke first," Fenris growled forcefully before Anders could say anything.

"Yes," Cassandra said, a softening in her voice but not the hard line of her expression. 

"I think this mission can be delayed," the Inquisitor said with a glance at her companions. "We're going back to Skyhold. But no funny business."

"I wouldn't dream of it," Isabela said, securing her hat on her head and moving back towards the horses. 

"I think," Anders said, "that she was talking to me." As he turned to move back toward the horses, he found Fenris blocking his path.

The elf glared into his face with a long and silent stare. 

"Hawke first," Anders told him.

Fenris growled wordlessly, and stepped aside to let him past.

Cole beamed. "I told you we would help," he said. "It's what she does. It's what she'll do again."


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to rozzingit and teztime for the beta especially because all of my dumb word substitutions and weird extra commas this week, and to everyone reading this for bearing with me -- between being a full time public defender and going to a comic convention last weekend, this story is clearly not zooming onto your screens with the speed that it began! BUT I'M SURE STILL GOING. So. ONWARD.
> 
> One more note: I've added a tag for suicidal ideation to this. It's brief, it's mild, but it's in this chapter, and I figure better safe than sorry on tagging for that kind of thing.

Skyhold loomed out of the snow as their horses crested the rise ahead, a craggy edge of rock whose lip had blocked the view ahead. The keep had before only been visible as a glimpse of distant irregular stone emerging out of the mist, uncannily hard to pick out by eye for a giant stronghold in the middle of the Frostbacks.

Noting that one of the riders seemed to be missing, Anders looked around and couldn't find Cole; but then, heartbeats later, he was there, riding at Anders's side.

"Home again, though home is gone," Cole said, barely loud enough to carry over the howling of the wind. "Broken to shards, shatters, shambles. You can see the whole world from here."

Anders looked around, but he could mostly only see snow and mountain. "Reassuring," he said.

Cole smiled up at him from beneath his hat, and said, "Don't worry," before riding ahead, his long-limbed horse kicking up snow as he charged down the road ahead.

Anders had been caught and hauled back more times than he could remember. When escape was a way of life, capture was a constant risk. None of his captures had been quite like this. Sometimes he'd been in chains; sometimes he'd been sandwiched between templars; once or twice he'd been locked up in dungeons. Once he'd been given life and freedom in exchange for the taint of darkspawn in his blood, a bargain he'd never forget, yet one that somehow seemed secondary now that the Commander of the Grey was out of his life and the rest of the Wardens were banished.

Technically, Anders was also banished, but that was so far down the list of reasons he wasn't wanted here it barely rated. Justice drowned out the Calling; it wasn't that he hadn't heard it, but that it had been buried beneath the iron grip of the spirit's grasp on his body, his mind, his blood. Now he felt its absence like a soft hush in his heart, more noticeable in its lack than it had ever been as a constant nagging tension of hungry death beneath the surface. He could no longer tell the difference between his awareness of oppression and his personal curse.

"I didn't realize," Isabela remarked at length, as though she could bear the silence no longer, "that we were actually going to find the earthly opposite of the ocean. This? This is the actual reverse of where I want to be."

"Sounds about right," Anders said.

Finally the Inquisitor spoke. "I am not prepared to give you the run of my keep," she said, reining up; her horse stamped, ducking its head under the pressure of her grip as it blew a snort against the wind. "It's for your own safety."

Anders looked into the crooked smile of the great-horned leader of the Inquisition, at her faintly quizzical eyebrows, and suspected she knew what he was thinking.

He said, "I'm only here for Hawke. When my task is done, you'll never see me again."

"We'll see about that," said the Seeker.

"Chase me if you will," Anders said with the drop of a shoulder in a shrug. "I'd think you have more important things to worry about."

"Than mass murder," Fenris murmured in a low rumble of dark-voiced irony from his horse.

"War _is_ murder," Anders snapped at Fenris.

Fenris looked at him without saying anything, his features blank but for the slight pull of a sneer at his lips.

"The point is," the Inquisitor said, turning her horse with a prance of its hooves over the muddy snow, "you'll be limited, and if you cause trouble, I will leave you to Cassandra."

"Thank you for that," Cassandra muttered with the queer hook of a smile across to the massive Qunari woman.

"But now we come to Skyhold," said Adaar. "Welcome to the Inquisition. Hya!" She kicked her horse forward, and the Bull was at her heels with the low roar of a laugh. They all charged forward through the gates and toward the stables with varying levels of enthusiasm -- except Cassandra, who checked and waited for Anders.

"This is not a joke," she said, blocking his path with her horse. "This is not a game. What you have done was an act of terror that will not be forgiven."

"What I did was an act of desperation," Anders said. He met her hard gaze, unflinching. "All I destroyed was the illusion that Kirkwall could continue as it was."

"And the lives of the innocent," Cassandra told him in righteous outrage, her head lifting like a banner on a battlefield.

"Yes," Anders said. He squared his shoulders, rallying beneath his own scowl. "The lives of the innocent. The afraid. The _tacit_. Those who made it acceptable. To live with tomorrow as every other yesterday. And I wouldn't take it back."

Her grip tightened on her sword, her nostrils flaring with the wordless huff of her breath. "Then you are a murderer without guilt," she said with high incredulity. "You would sit there and preach to me--"

"No," Anders cut across her with sudden fierceness, "not without guilt." He could feel the torrent rising up inside him, but this time, as he looked into the face her vehement accusation, he did not let it overcome him; instead, he claimed it. He leaned toward her over the brace of his hand at the pommel of his saddle, jaw tight and breath caught in his throat.

Cassandra looked at him. Waiting.

"I could do nothing else," Anders said with low heat. His hand rose in a fist, striking the air between their mounts. "There was no middle road, and death stood on both sides." Letting his hand fall again, he said: "I made a _choice_."

Cassandra's teeth showed in an expression that was not a smile. "And now you _live_ with it," she snarled at him.

"Yes," Anders said. He looked away, and turned his horse around hers, kneeing the animal into a trot after the others, and then rose in his stirrups as it gathered speed, giving her his back. He said: "I do."

When they caught up with the others and dismounted, Isabela swung around one of the heavy support columns in Skyhold's stable and gave him a thorough once over. She reached up and swept her hands over his robe, chasing away road dust and a dead leaf that had come from Maker only knew where.

"What?" Anders said.

"Still alive," Isabela said. She smiled crookedly up at him. "I owe Fenris five coppers."

Anders started to answer, glancing around for the elf, but found him nowhere to be seen already. Isabela was already breezing off, slinging her arm through a mildly surprised Iron Bull's as she demanded, "So where do you go to get a whiskey around here? You look like a horny giant who knows his way around a tavern."

Anders blinked away from them and found that Cassandra Pentaghast was not yet finished with him; she stood before him, shield braced at her hip, sword angled over her shoulder, eyebrow lifted.

"I'm not going to spontaneously detonate," Anders told her.

"Come with me," Cassandra said.

The air was thin and smelled of dust and stone and snow. The dungeon cells were empty at the moment, gated entries sealed off to the edges of the wooden decking trimmed with scaffolding. There was no far wall. There was only a drop that stretched so far below as to seem endless, clouded with mist in the distance, catching the sunlight in a brilliant gleam of gold and white.

Cassandra stood at the very edge of the wooden balcony that thrust against the backdrop of endless sky. Her weapon angled down and aside, she gestured with it to the drop, and then to the surrounding cells.

"I've seen uglier prisons," Anders said.

Cassandra looked at him, and then shoved by him with almost enough force to unbalance him off the walkway. She strode off and away, her footfalls vanishing into the distance. Every step in the monstrous chamber echoed until she was well gone.

Anders sat down on the edge of the walkway and let his feet dangle over the endless precipice, looking out into the golden light. For an instant, he thought about leaping into it, a death spent soaring into the wind. It wasn't something he wanted; it wasn't a death he'd court. But he could imagine it: the wind ripping at him, the fall, and then the horrible shattering crack of impact, after the long, long drop . . .

He covered his mouth in the curve of his hand, propping his chin and jaw on it, the prickle of stubble scraping against his skin, and sighed.

He had work yet to do. It was an ugly fantasy of an unwanted thing, and he could feel almost all of himself revolting against his brain for building the image, imagining the sensation, and not all of his reluctance to die was because he needed to bring Hawke back into the world.

All he wanted, all he had ever wanted, for all of his life, through all of his sins, at the most basic core of himself, was to be free. He didn't want to die; he wanted to _live_ , with everything that meant. And he wanted them all to live, too: all the mages, all his brothers and sisters, everyone who had ever been crushed by the weight of terror and torture and tradition. Now, although he could vaguely remember a time when he had wanted less, he felt that this was all he ever wanted, or could want.

Freedom. The sunlight gleamed against the mountains that stretched out below him, and the air tasted crisp in his mouth. Here, surrounded by the closed cells of the dungeon where he'd been left as a warning, it was strange that he could almost taste it.

Anders was drawn from his thoughts by the scrabble of heavy footsteps running hard down the stairs, their scramble reverberating into the wide arc of the high-ceilinged dungeon.

The last few steps slowed to a walk, as if whoever it was coming in had turned from a careening run to a careful, dignified step at the very last moment.

Anders felt a strange lightening in his chest, the barest beginning of a smile lifting his mouth at one corner. Suddenly, he knew what the word was going to be before it fell on his ears.

" _Blondie?_ "

***

Hawke woke from a fitful doze, curled carefully in on herself as she tried to restore some strength in the frozen air and fallen snow. New flakes of it were falling, but somehow the greenish sun still glared down at her to reflect across the mountaintop.

Shivering despite herself, she sat up. She wasn't sure what had woken her -- maybe a snowflake on her nose. Smearing her hand across her face, she hooked her other arm over the bend of her knee and looked out over the crags of stone, watching whirling snowflakes drift through the air.

The city loomed, dark and defiant of imagination, in the sky. Everything seemed greener than usual. Yawning with her fist absent-mindedly blocking her mouth, Hawke said, "All right, then. On we go," and scooped up her staff on the way to her feet. "Oof," she muttered. Her muscles ached. Even her muscle aches seemed to have muscle aches. She leaned on the staff and went on the best she could.

Stupid bloody mountain.

She had crunched only a few steps over the snow toward the climbing slope of the path up to that final peak when she stopped again -- she thought she heard something. It was a whisper of voices.

She turned her head, this way and that, trying to source the sound. It was a chant. Several voices. Male. Female. Unfamiliar. Very familiar.

"What the hell?" Hawke turned. "Anders?"

A pillar of green flame gouted out of the snow in her path. Hawke scrambled back only to discover another green-hued Fade fire shimmering to life in the snow behind her. It was unreal and strange, generating no heat, merely color and absence, as if it were a shadow, an echo of something far away even while it flickered and danced right in front of her.

The chanting grew louder when she approached the flames. She stared at them, and found that she was standing in a circle of fire. She _could_ avoid it; there were gaps in the flame.

She walked through one of them, and strode on her way, staff spiking into the snow with each step. What gave her pause is that the chanting grew quieter and more indistinct with each step she took away from the flames.

Hawke hissed. "This is stupid," she said, "and I'm going to regret it."

Then she turned around and walked back to the flames again. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath, and then opened them again. She lifted her hand and tested the dancing flames with it, watching them flicker and swarm around her gauntlet. It felt like nothing. If her eyes hadn't told her that there was something there, she wouldn't have believed it.

Except for the rhythmed chant of a spell she didn't quite know, but whose cadences were eerie and familiar. On some instinctual level, she thought she knew what it was.

A summoning. A demon summoning. The kind of binding magic that Anders had sworn never to do; the kind of binding magic that her father had trained her and Bethany never to touch.

Her eyes felt wet, and she was reasonably sure it wasn't from the snowflakes.

"Okay, Anders," she said. "O ... kay."

Hawke took another breath, faced the green shimmer of the flames, and stepped through.

***

Fenris stood on the battlements and looked out into snow-cloaked mountaintops that seemed to stretch forever. The stone was cool under his toes. Being out in the open under this much naked sky might feel exposed were it not so isolated; the towers of the ancient fortress almost seemed to rise up out of the clouds, surrounded by a landscape too hostile for population.

He needed the air. He'd tried to sit in for the latest round of conversations in the circular library, but he couldn't take it. Mages poring over books together, arguing about nothing he could understand or cared to, all of it sounding like an insurmountable barrier between him and the living, breathing woman he loved.

Even here, surrounded by miles of empty sky and virgin snow, Fenris could not remember the last time he felt so trapped. For a week now, he'd explored Skyhold from its courtyard to its rafters, and tried not to kill anyone while he waited for magic to unruin the wreck it had made of one more thing in his life.

Hawke would not thank him for the comparison.

"I heard I'd find you up here," Varric said from behind him.

Fenris bowed his head, leaning his weight on the brace of his hands against the stone wall before him. He huffed a breath through his nose and turned his head, glancing aside at him.

Varric stood with his arms folded loosely over his chest. His tunic was slashed deep to reveal the gleam of skin and prickle of chest hair despite the absurd cold of the mountains, but incongruously, he had coiled a scarf around his neck. It trailed down over his shoulder, though he had angled it to twist between rather than over the straps of the quiver, and Bianca sat quiescent on his back. Fenris considered Varric Tethras and fashion for a long and measured moment of silence, watching him.

"Yes," Fenris said finally. "Here I am."

He had not seen much of Varric for the past week, not since shortly after their arrival, when he had marched Anders right back out of the dungeon (where he belonged) and found him a room on the upper level of the tavern where, Varric said, it wasn't like it would be hard to keep an eye on him.

"Seriously, he's not going to blow up Skyhold, Seeker," Varric told Cassandra with hands spread wide, "although I can understand why that might be a concern--"

"This is ridiculous!" Cassandra exploded.

But Varric said: "He's spent enough time in dungeons. He's here for Hawke. This isn't about justice or forgiveness. I don't deal in those things. I'm just putting him in a damned bed, all right?"

So Anders had a bed, and Cassandra Pentaghast had not murdered any of them. Yet.

"How are you holding up, elf?" Varric said.

Fenris turned against the wall, putting his back to an entire mountain range, and folded his arms loosely across his stomach as he hooked one bare heel back against the stone. He gave Varric a look, low-lidded and as unimpressed as he could make it.

"I know, I know." Varric scraped booted feet across the distance between them and put his back to the wall beside Fenris, although gingerly, so as not to bump Bianca.

They leaned in silence for awhile, neither saying anything.

"The mage would be dead right now," Fenris said in a soft, deadly voice. "If..." 

"He'd deserve it," Varric said, but his vehemence was too quiet. He sounded worn and tired, and not enough like Varric.

Fenris glanced aside and down at him, and said, "Hnf."

The silence resumed.

Finally Varric said: "I should never have believed. I shouldn't have swallowed it for a moment. I'm sorry I wrote you. I'm sorry I got her into this--"

"Who are you apologizing to, dwarf?" Fenris cut him off. "Me?"

"Well--" Varric started, and then stopped.

Fenris shook his head, and said: "Don't."

Varric shifted against the stone and glanced away. He let out a long breath, trickling past his lips.

Fenris tightened his shoulders for a moment, and then let them fall looser and more relaxed as he tipped his head. "Hawke got herself into this," he said. "She got herself into everything. Always."

"I'm not here like some innocent bystander--" Varric started.

"Shut up, Varric," Fenris said.

Varric smiled a little. "Sorry," he said, "was I infringing on your broody, broody turf?"

Fenris looked at him for a long moment's silence, considering his reply. Finally, he inclined his head very slightly, and said: "Yes. Exactly."

Varric grinned. He slapped Fenris on the shoulder, risking potential damage to his hand. "I better watch that," he said.

"Yes," Fenris said again.

"Anyway," Varric said with a glance toward the door, and then a glance toward the sun slowly sinking in the distance, "Blondie said that he and Sparkles will be starting soon. I thought you'd want to be there."

Fenris straightened so quickly that he practically sprang forward when he moved for the door, fired like a shot.

Fenris had disliked the mage that Varric called Sparkles on sight. He was aggressively handsome in an extremely Tevinter way and stank of magic, the privileges of his birth, and a moral superiority in himself that Fenris did not at all trust. Of course, it was not unusual for Fenris to dislike a Tevinter on sight, or a mage for that matter.

But he couldn't look unkindly on how thoroughly the Tevinter had thrown himself into the problem. On the bottom floor of the library tower, the mages had built a kind of research station for themselves. The fire crackled in the hearth, and wolves ran in an endless hunt along the walls, but the table that centered the room was stacked with books, and at the moment, the floor seemed weighted with candles dripping wax and crystal vials of lyrium powder and tinctures.

Anders sat cross-legged on the floor amidst the candles, carefully etching symbols into the floor with a stick of charcoal.

"A little to the left, will you?" Dorian said, from behind a barricade of books across the table. "We need to be absolutely exact when we initiate the portal or I won't be responsible for what happens."

The third mage was a slight framed elf who was working on mixing a tincture from one of the powders, whose robes of office might have weighed her down if she were bothering to wear them. She had ink on her fingers and a smudge of something else on the line of her cheekbone, her pale eyes lifting from the bowl over which she worked. "Actually, young man, I believe you will be quite responsible," she said with a thin-lipped smile.

"It's a laugh a minute with you, Enchanter," the Tevinter said, licking his finger before delicately turning a page. He smiled up at her with eyes bright with charm or bullshit or some combination of the two and then slanted a look of arched eyebrows toward them at the door. He waved. One of his shoulders was bare, but only one of them. "Varric, I see you've brought our audience."

"You did say it was about showtime," Varric said.

Fenris was not sure it was possible for him to be more uncomfortable. He ducked under the ladder that led to the rest of the stacks on higher floors, hunching his shoulders against potential scrutiny as he eyed the growing signs of the magical ritual on the floor.

"I came on my own," Adaar said from behind him. She and the Iron Bull were now blocking the entrance from the central throne room, as only a pair of Tal-Vashoth could: with their whole bodies and their curving horns. "If you're going to turn my keep into a hollowed out shell full of demons I feel I should at least be present."

"For the fun part," the Iron Bull said.

"I thought you said there were going to be four," Varric said, shoving his hands as far into his pockets as they would go.

"Lady Vivienne would not hear of it," Dorian said. "It's all right, Inquisitor, I'm at least eighty-five percent sure that won't happen."

"Oh," Adaar said, "good."

"Is that better?" Anders asked finally from the floor. Dorian sprang out from behind the desk to peer down across his work.

"Very nice," Dorian cheered warmly, with only a bare edge of sarcasm in his bright and airy voice. "It's like you've practiced. Oh, wait, silly me. We've been practicing all week." He ruffled his fingers back through his artfully tousled dark hair.

Fenris glowered at both of them and for a moment couldn't decide which of them he hated more. He shifted uncomfortably, wanting to pace but lacking room in this chamber of candles and magic about to begin, and said, "Is it to be done, then?"

"You can't rush genius," Dorian said. He used Anders's shoulder as leverage as he straightened up, moving quickly across the room. "Here goes ... well, not nothing. . ."

"I don't like this, boss," the Iron Bull muttered as the three mages took up stations around the circle.

"Cheer up," Adaar said, hitching her shoulder against the wall and toying lightly with one of the toggles on her tunic. "It's sure to be interesting."

Fenris watched with growing unease as Dorian began the chant and the other two began. Fiona's voice rose clear and sure above the other two, with only a faint quiver in it. Anders joined her in quieter counterpoint. The three of them seemed to stand, staffs up and out, hands lifted. He wasn't sure how long it took. Time seemed to slow; the air took on a syrupy, languid quality. Smoke and sparks escaped from the sudden blaze of the fire on the hearth.

The bright glow of veilfire began to flicker and dance in curling shreds of flame around the edges of the circle. Thin flickers of yellow and red fire began to rise from the candles elsewhere in the room, floating into the air on an eerie push of magic. The tiny candles' flames flickered and danced in an eerie orbit around the three of them.

Fenris pulled his weapon from his back and twisted it in his hands, waiting in fierce tension for the first rising skeleton, the first roar of a demon launching itself through the stones of the walls. He stared into the eyes of a painted wolf and waited for it to lunge at him.

Nothing happened.

His heart felt tight in his chest as if someone had reached in and grasped it. His breath huffed past the scrape of his teeth against his lip, and he stared at the expression of perfect focus on Anders's face, the one he knew best of the three, and waited for some sign, some clue as to what was happening.

As he channeled all that power through himself, Fenris saw the beginning flickers of blue light that meant he was summoning the demon inside him, or else that it was taking control. He lifted his sword, hissing through his teeth. If Anders ruined this, of any of the damned fool magic things the damned fool mage had ever done, his death would not slake the fury that threatened to consume Fenris from the inside, but it would be a good start.

Fenris could not tell whether he was actually sensing something going wrong, or whether he was just increasingly uneasy with each chanted word, with each flicker of magical fire. Someone shouted -- the youth that he hadn't noticed in the room before -- and it was not until then that it actually became clear, beyond Fenris's own sense of generalized misgiving.

"Wait!" Cole shouted, springing up onto the table. "No! Stop! Stop!"

Then there was a great burst of flame and wind out of the circle, a light shining white and blazing so fiercely it was hard to look directly at. Fiona stood steady as a rock, still chanting, her staff raised with a brilliant blue glow to the crystal that crowned it. Invisible force seemed to blast outward from the center of the circle, and for a moment there was the image of a figure written in white light, but it was though it was seared into his heart.

"Hawke," Fenris whispered.

The shape of her seemed to look up, startled, in the center of the circle. Veilfire rose up around her in a flare of green. The flame wrote itself up Dorian's staff, shimmering and then riding up his arms, blazing across his shoulders. His voice was racked with pain but he kept chanting, growing increasingly hoarse with passing seconds.

"No, stay where you are!" Cole cried desperately from the table, but the figure seemed to move, and more force buffeted the room, wind hurling papers and scattering the candles.

"Cut it off," Adaar roared. "Whatever this is, it's too--"

Then, buffeted by invisible force, Anders suddenly crashed to the ground, his knees buckling beneath him. Wax, broken glass and, torn paper and charcoal dust seemed everywhere. The flames vanished, all but the crackle in the hearth and a few candleflames in spilled puddles of wax across the floor.

Fenris lunged forward with his weapon in his hands. "Anders, damn you, if you've ruined this--"

"Stay back!" Dorian ordered with startling force in a voice without any of his bright and cheery airs.

On the floor, Anders lay face first. His hair was falling forward, loosened from its neat tail, and his face seemed planted into the floor. For a long moment, he didn't stir.

"Hell," Varric said hoarsely from the far corner of the room. "What ... happened?"

The room was silent.

***

Hawke had thought that every muscle in her body ached before. Now it seemed like every corner of herself was stiff and tense with pain. She was lying face first on a stone floor. There was a puddle of wax and smeared charcoal right by her face, and a distinctly weird ashy smell that at least did not smell like the fade.

She turned her head, blinking her eyes open. Disoriented, her gaze swept past faces she didn't know, while her brain supplied her with a random assortment of details, like, what an elegant enchanter's robe, and then, that is the most well-manicured moustache I've seen since the last time I got stuck in Orlais.

She parted her lips to say something, or maybe to groan, and her voice caught in her throat at the next face her eyes saw.

She lunged to her feet, scrambling in a sudden rush of adrenaline and delight. "Fenris!" she cried.

After that, only two things registered.

The first was that Fenris jerked back and away from her with an expression of baffled revulsion written plain across his face.

The second was that the voice in her ears was not her own.

Hawke looked down at herself.

And it was definitely Anders's voice she heard say, "Oh _shit_."


	11. Chapter 11

The first time Anders lost control of his body was a very long time ago. 

For all the vaunted secrecy of the Harrowing, everyone knew ... something of what it was they would ask. There were always rumors, always questions, and each mage that passed was sworn to secrecy and each mage that failed was dead or tranquil, and the thing about a tranquil mage is that you couldn't trick them into revealing anything, really. They were too rational. Young and curious and frightened, Anders had spent hours talking to the tranquil, trying to befriend them, trying to understand them. All were coolly pleasant. None could connect with him. 

So for all the rumors, for all the whispers, he was never certain until it was upon him and they forced him out of his body and into the Fade, to walk in the dreamlike unreality in an endless circle, waiting for whatever it was they had unilaterally decided he was ready to die if he couldn't face.

The demon had known. Taunted him with it. Prowling around him on mighty feline paws as they fought, describing his frozen, helpless body to him, and the circle of Templar blades pointed straight at his heart, waiting for him to fail.

He'd fought his way back, destroyed the massive cat in fire and ice, but the truths the demon spoke haunted him even after it was gone. Because when he opened his eyes, he woke in a circle of steel and even if not all their blades were pointed at him, they were clearly all ready to kill. 

Because they were waiting for him to fail.

Because they were waiting for all of them to fail.

There were other opportunities after that for Anders to give up control, opportunities he never took. The first time he escaped in the company of other mages, they summoned demons to fight at their backs. Anders didn't, and ran on alone into the woods, because he would not prove them right. He hadn't failed; he hadn't fallen; he just had to get _out_. The roaring of the battle between templar and abomination behind him as he fled Kinloch through forest and tunnel had haunted his dreams for days afterwards.

The next time that Anders lost control of his body, he gave it willingly.

The dead body that Justice wore was falling apart around him and Anders had opened himself to him, welcomed him. Justice asked if he had the courage to accept. It hadn't only been about courage, but that was the part of himself that Justice had seen lacking. 

He'd said, "Yes," and they'd rained down destruction on Warden and Templar alike before they'd fled together from Amaranthine. Sometimes he still half-expected to look down and see forgotten bloodstains marring his skin, blood from people he didn't remember murdering.  
Whatever they'd become together, there were times that he'd hated it, feared it. There were times that he'd wanted nothing more than to be able to unsee the injustice around him, to be able to cloak himself in that same complacency, that same hypocritical and wilful blindness that, for example, Hawke wore as comfortably as an old cloak. When his body was run ragged, when his emotions ran riot, when all that was left of him was a narrow strip of exhausted hate and all he wanted to do was weep if only he could find the energy for it. 

Now, though, now was different.

When he came to himself he was already moving, and his voice was being used.

"--got to be kidding me," he heard himself say, and it wasn't quite how he would have said it, although he was a hundred percent on board with the sentiment.

_You have got to be kidding me_ , he thought, trying to hear how he would say it in his head.

She had flooded every corner of him, as though her spirit was too much for this small and overfull vessel. He could feel heat from the tip of his toes to the top of his head, like he had soaked up flame without burning from it in every corner of himself. He remembered the feeling of two in one, but now there were most distinctly and definitely three, because he knew that the bubble of harshest resentment had a strange, other quality, a distinct and fractured difference that he could not remember feeling in some time.

He had so let Justice into himself, they had so become Vengeance together, that the lines of distinction between them had blurred long ago. Both were always there. But one of the sharpest points of contention, the most fractive and divisive thing in their life, his life, had been this one.

He could feel himself loving Hawke and hating Hawke at the same time, and he could also feel himself being extremely uncomfortable with how aware she was of all of it, because he could feel that awareness inside him, sense it like one of his own thoughts with a very different tone of voice.

"Oh, hell," he said. "No, no, no," and clutched at the sides of his head with both hands.

_You've got that right!_ Hawke was shouting without the benefit of a voice.

"Gnyaaah," was the noise that escaped his throat next, and it could have been either of them. Or both. Or all three.

He stumbled from the room, or tried to. He could feel his shoulder smashing into the solid bulk of the Tal-Vashoth who had posted himself to the door but barely processed that he had bounced off him on his way out into the hall. He broke into a run on finding the doorway and then found that he had too few legs because Hawke didn't want to go anywhere, and there was a confused moment of total disorientation and then he was flat on his back and looking up at the ceiling.

"Hawke!" Anders shouted, "Stop it! Just let me get -- no, hold on, Anders, anyone who could actually help us with this is -- Hawke, I need to get ahold of myself!" He roared, "Stop _fighting me_ for once in your _life_!"

To his amazement, she did. Anders put his hand to the wall and hauled himself back to his feet, panting as he walked carefully down the hallway, out through the broad central hall of Skyhold and into the brilliant daylight of the courtyard, all clear mountain air and brilliant sunlight.

He paused, and turned his face to the sun, eyes closed as he drew in a long breath of the cool, sweet air. It was her need, he was reasonably sure, but it had been a long time since he had been able to pay attention.

"Blondie--?" he heard Varric behind him.

"We're going to need a minute, Varric," Anders said.

_Come on, Anders! Let me talk to them! I've been stuck in the Fade for--_

Eyes still closed, Anders thought very firm and very clear: _We're going to need a minute, Hawke. This is my body, not yours, which means we're doing this my way._

_Self-righteously and with an abnormally high casualty rate?_

Anders felt his hands forming into fists and the beginnings of the torrential rage beginning at the core of himself. He could feel an unaccustomed fear, too, as Hawke sensed the build at the base of his spine. He turned and punched the hard stone curve of the outdoor stairs on which he stood, huffing a long breath out through his teeth.

Varric was standing there behind him, looking cautiously appalled. "She's -- she's in there?" he said.

_Anders!_ , he could hear Hawke wail inside his head, and he gritted his teeth for a moment, stubbornly refusing to give up control of himself again, even for an instant--

Until he looked into Varric's face, and slowly, forcibly, stood straight and let his hands fall. "All right," he said.

***

Hawke shook out her -- his? -- hand and eyed the knuckles for signs of bruising or scraping. "Damn, he hits really hard," she said. In Anders's voice, but with her surprise. She looked up at Varric, eyes widening, and then spread her arms wide. "Varric!"

"Okay," Varric said, looking up at her (him). With the choke of a laugh buried in his voice, he told her, "That's ... that's really weird, Hawke."

"I know," Hawke said, and feeling Anders's whole-hearted agreement inside her, she added, "We know." Lifting her hand to rub at her eyes, she then ended up smearing it over her face, feeling the unaccounted prickle against her skin over his jaw. Suddenly obscurely guilty, she dropped her hand.

_Uh, sorry_ , she thought at him.

She could feel the laughter climbing inside her, inside him, as he answered her: _You're inhabiting my body and you're going to apologize for touching my face?_

"Shut up, Anders!" Hawke snorted, and saw the look on Varric's face, and grinned at him, crookedly. "It's really crowded in here," she said. 

"I -- can imagine," Varric said. "Actually, I'm not sure I can imagine that. You're both in there? With Justice too?"

"Yeah, he really hates me," Hawke said. "Let's -- not talk about that part."

More people were following Varric out into the daylight now, although for the most part they were people she didn't immediately recognize. The mustachioed man, an extremely dignified elf lady, some Qunari--

"Inquisitor Adaar," she said with an airy wave, "nice to see you again. Haven't seen that look on your face since right before you got the hell out of the Fade. Where's Alistair? Please tell me I didn't indulge in all that showy self-sacrifice for nothing."

"He's leading the Wardens," said the Inquisitor. "Back to Weisshaupt."

"Except this one, apparently." Hawke patted Anders on the chest, over his heart.

"Technically, he might be under arrest," the Inquisitor said, watching her with a slight tilt of her great horned head. "Though I've granted him free range around Skyhold, more or less. Cassandra's keeping an eye on him."

Hawke turned her gaze toward the distant shimmer in the sky where the Breach had been, teeth grazing her lower lip. Some part of her wondered about the curve of Anders's lower lip, and the graze of his teeth, and she was immediately aware of Anders's desire to shift uncomfortably and/or blush.

_That's really distracting_ , she thought. _Stop -- listening or something!_

_It's my brain! This is all in my brain!_ Anders protested, which had to be completely fair.

"Shit," Hawke muttered. "This is just--"

"Are you all right?" asked Adaar.

"We're doing great. I always wanted to possess somebody," Hawke said. "So, Corypheus?"

"Defeated," Adaar said. She lifted her chin slightly, smile slightly crooked on her lips. "We sealed the breach. But we couldn't have done it without you. The Nightmare--"

"Spider juice," Hawke confirmed. She planted her hands on her hips. "I'm just going to hazard a guess that you didn't actually mean to leave my body in the Fade when you brought me out here."

"I'm still not entirely sure how that happened," said the man with the moustache. He really was ridiculously good-looking, it occurred to Hawke to note. "Technically it was a summoning and bringing physical objects out of the Fade isn't the easiest feat to manage, but why the summoning should have resulted--"

_Dorian_ , Anders supplied helpfully, along with a few flashes of memory that Hawke didn't remember having: heads close together, poring over massive tomes of Fade-intensive magic texts, dark hairs prickling over the skin of a bare arm whose hand angled past to turn a page, the dusty library smell cut with a prickle of spice and clean male sweat.

_Very nice_ , Hawke thought.

"Oh, shut up," Anders said.

There was a moment's pause. 

Hawke cleared her throat and pressed the heel of her hand against one eye. "Sorry, we were having a -- little discussion," she said. "Internally."

Varric started to laugh. It was a laugh Hawke knew well. It was the _no one will believe this in a million years_ laugh. 

"You have to go back," said an unfamiliar voice. A young boy, pale blond and mashing a giant hat between his hands.

_Cole_ , she somehow knew, and it was probably Anders's fault. _Compassion_ , Anders added. _He's a spirit of Compassion. Kind of._

"Okay so I didn't really want to be permanently Anders," Hawke said, "I'm pretty sure even Anders doesn't actually want to be permanently Anders--"

_Thanks a lot_ , she heard Anders's thought sour in her mind, but felt herself smiling, and wasn't sure whose smile it was exactly. It felt very familiar.

"--so obviously I have to go back," Hawke said, "but--"

"This isn't the way," Cole said. "It might have worked, it could have worked, should have worked, but they were in the way. Together, driven, together, apart--" He picked up the hat and put it back on his head. "He needed her too much," he said sorrowfully.

Hawke felt the burn a flush in her cheeks and at the back of her neck, and she was pretty sure it wasn't hers. She hadn't blushed like that in years. Covering her cheeks with her hands, she grinned unaccountably, and said, "Poor bastard. Are you saying this happened because Anders--?"

"Not exactly," Dorian said. "If that were the case I expect you would be sharing skin with your actual lover, who was just skulking around here a moment ago." He was frowning. "No, we'll need to do a ritual to send you back to the Fade, which is easy enough, but we'll need to rest first. There's no one here who doesn't need to rest."

"How long--?" Hawke started to ask.

Then Adaar said, "Are you really saying there's no way to bring her physically out of the Fade, Dorian?"

"No, no, not _no_ way, but it's sort of the same problem as physically entering the Fade in the first place. You could try reopening one of the rifts," Dorian said with a slight nod toward the dormant green mark on the Inquisitor's hand. "The trouble will be getting Hawke to the right Fade ... geography, so to speak."

"So we go all over Orlais and Fereldan to all of the sealed rifts and open them again and Hawke can shout through them for her body to come sauntering up," Varric said in a tone that bespoke just how skeptical he was about this.

"Not exactly," Dorian said with a faintly beleaguered smile. "Look, this is unique in my experience, but I suspect with a little more library time--"

"Could have sworn there was an expert on Fade geography around here," the Inquisitor said, unaccountably sour. She knuckled at one eye.

"Check under the couch," said the Iron Bull, beside and a little behind her, with a snort.

"I don't suppose you have any idea where you are in the Fade?" Dorian gave her a hopeful smile that did not expect much.

Hawke laughed, strangely hoarse, as if Anders's throat just wasn't used to it, which gave her a strange pang of sadness. "Maker," she said. "I'm on a mountain. It's a really big mountain. But it could be any mountain. It's probably Mt. Symbolism or something." 

"Cold as snow, bright as teeth," Cole said. "Whispers on the wind that keep safe, for now, between light and dark. When you crown the top, you find what's there, the hardest road, the furthest leap, the long way home between her claws."

Hawke stared at him. "What--?"

"That's where you are," Cole said as if everything else he'd just said were completely simple and understandable.

"It's going to make sense," Adaar said. "Thank you, Cole."

Cole smiled. "You're welcome," he said, and turned and walked back inside.

"You're remarkably confident of that," Dorian said to the Inquisitor with a particularly edged smile.

She shrugged. "It might not ever make sense to me," she said. She glanced across Hawke and Varric, and then returned her attention to Dorian. "Back to the drawing board?"

"Yes," sighed Dorian. "I'm going upstairs. Any kind soul who would care to bring by some wine when you pass..." Without waiting for an answer, he turned and strode off back inside.

The Inquisitor looked a little mystified and tense as she considered them, and then shook her head without saying anything else, turning to head into the depths of her own keep. 

"Hawke," Varric said, coming forward to grip her by the forearm with a sudden smile, weirded out but so vehemently determined to take this in stride and make it all right that Hawke couldn't decide whether it made her want to laugh or cry. "Blondie. The three of you. Whoever you are. Let's get a drink. I told Isabela I'd catch up with her down there, and she's never going to believe this." 

Hawke considered for a moment, and then turned to start down the stone steps, saying, "You know what, Varric, that sounds like the best idea ever."

_You really want to get drunk now?_ was the dubious thought from the part of her that was Anders.

_Don't you?_ Hawke thought back at him.

He didn't have an argument, and he didn't wrest control of his legs back, so it seemed to her like whatever part of them was the naysayer, it was overruled.

"I really hate Fade stuff," Hawke sighed. 

***

Fenris felt raw.

Pacing had driven him from the chamber but not in any particular direction, and finally, aimless, he turned to storm back the way he'd come, just as fruitlessly. When he'd first seen Anders fall, he had assumed failure; another setback, but another attempt to come, with hope held out for a better chance. What this was instead as ... abominable.

He'd rejected his initial disbelief in exchange for horror, and that impelled him forward now. He wanted to leave, to escape from here and leave it all behind in the frozen tracks of the snow surrounding them, except that he'd sworn he'd never do that to her again.

So he didn't.

He paced.

Going nowhere, he kept walking.

There were too many people in Skyhold, too many strangers to dodge through the halls, too many soldiers and guards that he seemed to trip over at every corner. When he'd sought isolation before he'd been able to find it, but now he seemed doomed to traverse halls clogged with humanity and noise. Even when they were not speaking, they seemed at the verge of speech, about to plunge into gossip or speculation, or even to ask him questions as he charged through on his quest for silence.

Eventually, he found that, in fact, he was going somewhere in particular.

The room was empty at this point, the fire crackling disregarded in the hearth, a few disregarded spills of wax encrusted like frozen puddles on the stone floor. Fenris walked around it, picking his way over the scorch of symbol and scattered mess, staring at the magic gone wrong that was still written into the floor.

Dropping into a crouch, he clasped his hands as he hunkered over the broken circle, fingers loosely held before him between the wide spread of his knees, and stared, taut and unseeing, at nothing.

He should never have trusted them. Any of them. He should have known that magical failure was the worst failure, a failure that could encompass the worst that he could imagine and surpass it without even blinking. Now Hawke wasn't just dead; she was gone, her spirit swallowed inside an abomination. It was all too easy to imagine them now as the beginning of a monster of subsumed souls, growing into an unsightly mass the way that the First Enchanter of Kirkwall had as he bloated into a massive creature of demonic madness and swallowed innocents.

She was lost to him, devoured by magic, because he had been fool enough to hope.

Surging to his feet, he strode across the room, blade unslung in his hands; he slashed one of the chairs to broken wooden shards and then kicked a disembodied chair leg across the room to smash into the wall.

It was unworthy of him, and it didn't make him feel any better.

The thing was, he wasn't sure what else he could have done. If he had left it alone, if he _hadn't_ trusted Anders, if he _hadn't_ let the mages do their worst, she would still wander trapped in the Fade forever, not released, not dead, but caught in an unreal prison, and he couldn't wish that on her either. 

The tears burned in his eyes like fury more than despair, but there was some of both. 

He strode up the stairs away from the wreck of the room, leaving the mess behind him. His sword was restless in his hands. When he stepped out of the dusty shadows into the book-lined walls of the library, he saw what he was looking for her, without realizing he'd been looking for it.

"You," he rasped.

The Tevinter mage was leaning up against the sill of the window, catching the last fading beams of sunlight on the broad pages of an ancient book as evening crept up on Skyhold. He looked up over the top of the book and his glance rapidly took in a few details of Fenris's aspect.

Fenris lifted the blade and menaced him with it, breathing in a long, controlled breath as he let strength wake in him, burning in his veins in a long ride of power. The lyrium blazed in his skin like the rage in his blood.

He said, "You did this to her, mage." 

"Let's not be hasty," the Tevinter said in a tone too rapid to be properly conciliating. He lowered the book, closing it too quickly to mark his page. "What I was trying to do was _help_."

Fenris knew this was probably true, in some part of his mind that wasn't on fire with grief, and rage, and loss. He said, "You failed," and leapt.

The mage moved too fast for reality, leaving a thin trail of ice to whisper against the wooden floor, melting to a puddle as he dove for cover. "Calm down, blast you!" he yelped, scrambling beneath a heavy-looking low-slung table. "This isn't going to help your precious Hawke any, now, is it?"

Fenris pursued him with a stroke of his weapon that brought enough force to cleave the table in half. As Dorian brought up his staff and a brilliant sheen of protective force began to cloak his skin, a wine bottle came out of nowhere and winged Fenris upside the head. It banged against the shelf next and then hit the floor, not quite shattered, but cracked, bleeding a thin trickle of richly red wine to soak the floor underfoot. 

Fenris whirled to face his new attacker and found that the massive Qunari was unslinging an also massive black-bladed axe from his back. "Easy there, elf," he suggested in a friendly, cordial tone. "You'll want to take a step back."

Dorian swore in highly aggravated Tevinter, words that Fenris hadn't heard in awhile, and words that did nothing to endear him. "This is all kinds of ridiculous," he said. "In the middle of Skyhold? In the middle of the Inquisition library?"

"Stand aside," Fenris said to the Tal-Vashoth.

"Won't be doing that," said the Iron Bull. 

"I'll kill you," Fenris insisted, glowing blade quivering in his hands.

"Don't think that'll be happening either," rumbled the Bull, and he shifted his weight, opening his stance with a wide gesture of the axe, "but why don't you go ahead and take your shot?"

The arrogance was almost enough to overpower him, but not quite. Fenris spat. "You protect this mage because you think he's your friend," he said, "you fight at his side so you think that it will be different this time, that everything won't come to ruin and destruction, but you're wrong. You're completely wrong. It's always the same."

The Iron Bull grinned. "Maybe I'm just here because I'm itching for a good fight."

"In _here_?" Dorian demanded.

Fenris stared up at grinning giant before him and held himself absolutely still.

Anders's voice behind him said, "It's not ruined and destroyed _yet_ , Fenris. Just a ... setback."

It was Anders's voice, but his heart clanged with the weird certainty that it wasn't Anders who was speaking.

"Don't," he rasped hoarsely. He felt the energy draining out of him, the light and power fading from his skin. His grip loosened on the massive sword as he lowered it. He felt as though his fingers weren't quite responding to him correctly.

The hook of an expression on Anders's face was all wrong, halfway between smile and tension, and Fenris only looked at his eyes for a moment before he had to look away. It was too unreal, what he saw there. Too strange. 

"Fenris," she said softly.

"Don't, Hawke," Fenris said, voice breaking with ache. He wanted to bolt but there was nowhere to run to, not really, and it wasn't like it would be any less strange anywhere else. He let the sword fall and said, "I've already failed you."

"No," Hawke said. She stepped forward and caught him by the wrists, turning his hands over to claim them. Anders's hands were strong and broad, long-fingered, heavier than Hawke's hands, though hers had always been strong. "Come on, I'm still kicking. That's way better than it was yesterday, isn't it?"

Fenris looked down at their hands, and up into Anders's face. He saw the hook of her smile on his lips, the bright gloss of unshed tears in his eyes sheening all that warmth there, and he gripped the hands holding his, whoever's they were. 

"Are you really going to tell me that magic hasn't ruined this, Hawke?" he said.

"Never," Hawke said. She leaned forward to draw him closer in, resting her forehead against his. The scent was all wrong -- well, except the whiskey, that was actually a fairly normal Hawke smell, the whiskey. 

Fenris found himself weirdly aware of his body and of Anders's, of the heat of him, the rangy length of his height. He was obscurely offended at being shorter than he usually was when she touched him like this. 

Hawke said, "Made it weird as hell, sure, but ruined? Never."

Fenris felt the chuckle caught in his throat, and then suddenly she was wrenching away from him, balking back so hard and so fast that she slammed into the nearest of the bookshelves. Books rained down over the top of them both.

Dorian yelped, "Of all the -- don't move! You're going to get wine on them! Stop!"

"Hawke," Anders said out loud from the floor, books on his lap and a couple on his shoulders and one even slung open across his head like a very strange hat, "I really, I really have to draw the line somewhere."

***

Anders wouldn't look at Fenris, so Hawke couldn't see his face when she heard him groan.

"I'm -- going outside. For a walk," Fenris said in a very strangled voice. He picked up his sword -- she could hear the scrape of it -- and turned quietly to go.

"Well," Dorian said crisply as he walked across the library floor to offer Anders a hand up, "that was bracing.

_We have to go after him_ , Hawke insisted.

Anders shook his head and clambered back to his feet, only partly relying on Dorian's arm to get himself up. "Let me help you get these put away," he said.

_Anders!_ Hawke wanted to yell. _Do you know how much stupid crap in my love life I could circumvent if I just follow him when he does this?_

_Not this time_ , Anders answered grimly. 

He and Dorian spent the better part of half an hour putting books away while the Iron Bull flagged down some servants to help him find towels and another bottle of wine. By the time the mess was cleared up, Hawke was sizzling with frustration inside Anders's head, except that at this point she honestly wasn't sure whose temper was shorter, since they were ... both the same?

"Let him have a little dignity, Hawke," Anders said as he shrugged his way out of the library. "I know it's hard to imagine him having any since he's such a bloody-minded murdering idiot, but honestly."

_Not like you're giving me any choice_ , Hawke said. She felt him cross his arms over his chest, and she knew it was her doing it.

"Oh, do I get to do things now? Maybe I'll jump up and down and wave my arms around," she said, and started to, aware that she was being ridiculous but somehow unable to stop herself.

_Those are my arms and we look ridiculous_ , Anders observed from inside their head. _I'll let you go talk to him but you really have to promise me no kissing him. Please._

"Why, are you afraid you'll like it?" Hawke stomped up the stairs toward the rookery and felt the hot flush on her cheeks even as she felt the beginnings of that terrifying surge of wroth in the pit of her gut. She gripped the railing and stopped, hissing her breath through her teeth as she ducked her head. The anger seemed to rise, boiling from the depths of her to the tips of her fingers, and she felt the weird crackling light escaping her skin, flashing against the surface of her fingers as she stared at them, gripping the rail.

_Stop! Stop panicking! Stop fighting me!_ "Stop fighting me, Hawke!" Anders straightened up, halfway up the stairs, and dragged his hands back through his hair. 

_Is this what it's like to be you all of the time?_ Hawke asked him, feeling chastened and wondering that he managed to function at all, really. 

"You get used to it," Anders muttered.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to my betas, teztime and rozzingit, particularly teztime this time for making me go back and rewrite a bunch even though I whined about it.

The night was crisp, biting against his skin as he walked up the steps and out into the starlight. The moon was a thin sliver of silver-white where it hung in the air, more dark than light, and it seemed to Anders almost as though there was even more space out here by night than there was by day. By day, the sunlight beamed its brilliance off the snow, and puffs of foggy cloud misted off the surface. By night, the dark seemed endless.

Hawke wasn't interested in the view; she'd seen it before, she'd had her fill of mountain vistas lately, and primarily, she had other things on her mind.

Along for the ride, Anders tried not to grind his teeth.

A torch hung from the far parapet as she walked the ramparts, which left the elf leaning eerie and quiet in the shadows, his elbows propped against the ancient stone, his back bowed as if beneath an invisible weight. The wind tugged at both of them, uncomfortably cool and whistling intermittently in the starlight.

"Fenris," Hawke said with his voice, and he watched as Fenris bowed his head, taut arms braced and features hard.

"What is it." His voice was thin and sharp, too flat in its intonation to really carry the question. His jaw hard, he did not look at them.

Hawke stopped, rocking back slightly on her (his) heels, and lifted a hand to scrub at the back of his neck. 

"You can't just not talk to me," Hawke said with a peculiar petulant note in her voice that Anders found uncomfortably familiar in his ears.

_Do I--?_

_Yes_ , Hawke thought very hard and very fast, newly tense with rising irritation. _Shut up! This is hard!_

"I don't know what to say." Fenris stared out into the dark rather than look at them, his voice low and smoky with a kind of tense withdrawal, as if the words were subject to a great internal pressure before they escaped his lips.

"Say -- say _something_." Hawke strode forward, eating the distance between them, and reached up to snag Fenris by the shoulder, pull him to face her. "Anything! Don't just stand there looking-- _lost_."

The desperate need in her voice (his voice) struck a chord in Anders, bone deep, and he had a sudden repeat of the sensation of resonance. Her need was too like his own. Discomfort seethed through him, seeming to split into different forms that Hawke pressed him to keep caged. The word _obsession_ seemed to creep up his spine where he couldn't reach it.

It was so strange. He could feel no vindictive pleasure at watching pain write itself in Fenris's body language, because as he witnessed it, he saw it through Hawke's eyes and it cut him to the heart. He'd thought that any fellow feeling between them was limited to this one narrow category: Hawke, Hawke before everything else.

But now, she was watching Fenris through his eyes, and he felt every heartbeat.

Fenris ducked away, shrugging her off, and took a step back, lifting his hands in a broad splay of fingers. "I _feel_ lost, Hawke," he said, his voice strained to the point of hoarseness. "I feel I've lost you."

"I'm standing right here!" Hawke flung out her arms wide.

Fenris turned and glowered at her.

Hawke amended, "Sort of," and dropped her hands to hook her thumbs against Anders's belt, boot scuffing over the stone before her with shades of a schoolboy awkwardness that Anders felt all too clearly.

Shoulders hunching, Fenris leaned on his hip against the stone and blew out his breath. Throat working in a swallow, he said, "This is ... so strange."

"It's only for a little while," Hawke said. "Tomorrow -- I mean, we're going to fix it, Fenris. It's going to be all right."

 _Let the Maker hear you_ , Anders thought.

From somewhere else inside himself, he heard a voice he was used to thinking of as his own saying, _It is amazing how optimistic hypocrisy permits you to be._

"What if it's not?" Fenris asked in a voice like a hush. It rose in fierceness, in volume, as he went on, "You would stand there, as _him_ , in his voice, and ask me to trust to magic to solve this?"

"I would ask you to trust _me_ to solve this," Hawke said, standing a little straighter. "Come on, Fenris, we've been in worse situations than this."

Fenris's eyebrows spoke volumes as to his opinion of this insistence. So did Anders's, for that matter.

 _Trust_ , whispered Justice, on a tide of new tension that Anders felt like a new binding constricting his muscles.

"You're all impossible." Hawke rubbed her hand over her face, smoothing it back over his hair. Unused as she was to the tail that bound it, she drew tendrils loose with the passage of her hand; they fell forward around his face, tickling against his skin. Now that was going to bother him.

"I'm trying, Hawke," Fenris said. He said her name like an invocation. Stepping forward, he reached for her hands, and she gripped his with enough pressure that she would have put weaker digits at risk of crushing. "I can't lose you," he whispered. "Not again."

Anders felt the knot in his throat, the sting behind his eyelids of tears neither of them wanted to shed, and he wanted to bolt again, but this time Hawke's grip was too strong; she was ready for him, and she needed this more than he needed to escape from it. Which was impressive, really. Anders had a pretty powerful flight reflex.

"You won't," Hawke said, squeezing tight in the pressure of their joined hands. She bit down hard on her lower lip, and then said, words coming in a rush, "Just don't walk away from me. Please. I'm standing right here."

They were close enough that he could smell the musky heat of him again, and he was uncomfortably aware of the need written open and raw across the dark, tattooed features, the anguish bright in his pale eyes. He was uncomfortably aware of the lean lines of him in proximity, the echoes in Hawke's thoughts, the desire to crush his body close and hold him so that he could not escape, paired with fear that to press would be to make him flee.

Anders was also highly aware of how familiar he was with feeling the thrill of furious disgust and the need of deep affection in close proximity.

Of how much he loved Hawke, even though she was everything he hated. Of how her drive and her strength of personality and her dynamic, ridiculous, absurd, and terrible sense of humor had blazed her name on his heart even while he hated her privilege, her hypocrisy, her stubborn certainty of how right she was about everything.

He was newly aware of the sharp angles and hard lines of the man whose hands he held, and he desperately wanted to escape from Hawke knowing any of this.

The pause was becoming noticeable. 

"What if -- what if it can't be fixed," Fenris demanded in a soft, strangled voice.

"We'll work out a time share," Hawke said promptly.

Fenris choked, an astonished, appalled sort of noise. "You--" he sputtered, and started to pull back.

"It will be fine. Anders will get on board," Hawke pushed on recklessly. She framed Fenris's face in the broad spread of one of Anders's hands and grinned determinedly into his astonishment. "I'll take the body on Tuesdays and he can get an extra long nap--"

 _I can tell that you're joking, and that's the reason I'm not hurling us both off this rampart_ , Anders thought.

"Damn you for making me laugh, Hawke," Fenris said on the breath of a chuckle that sounded more humor than disgust, although not by any great measure.

The tilted curve of his smile, slight and ghostly in the moonlight, took Hawke's breath away through the teeth of her grin, which Anders felt like a snap kick to the gut.

 _I never knew how hard you fell_ , he thought unwillingly.

Hawke tucked her head against Fenris's again. "That's what love is, right?" she said. "Laughing at my jokes?"

"That's the only explanation I can think of," Fenris murmured. He gripped her by the arms, thumbs pressing hard inside her wrists, and ducked his head away from hers. "Damn it. Hawke. Could you not have taken over any other body? Any body but this one?"

Anders hated to agree with him, but Hawke was already shaking her head.

"It could totally be worse," she said.

To Fenris's great look of skepticism, she stepped back and put her hands to the front of Anders's robes. "No, I mean it, I'll show you," she said with a brightly wicked grin. "He's really fit under here--"

"Don't you dare," Fenris growled, at the same time Anders thought, _If you think I'm kidding about jumping_ , and Hawke stopped, bracing her hands at Anders's hips instead.

Anders could feel how hard she worked to ignore the gathering tendrils of inchoate anger that based themselves in his gut, the pressure that went beyond Anders's simple loathing. But Hawke was focused on Fenris. 

"It could completely be worse," Hawke repeated. 

"How," Fenris said flatly.

"It could be Merrill," Hawke said with an air of great triumph.

Fenris groaned and turned aside, putting both of his hands to his face as he moved off toward the wall.

"See? That would be worse." Hawke grinned.

 _At least Merrill would have the right ... body type,_ Anders thought suspiciously.

 _Nah_ , Hawke thought back. _That's the last thing to bother him._

Hawke followed Fenris to the wall and captured him by the hips, drawing him back into the fold of her arms. He was very tense for the first few heartbeats, and then seemed to relax into the pressure of the embrace by sheer will. Anders envied him; he felt as though there weren't enough words for how uncomfortable he was with this.

"Anders is mad because he forgot to say no hugging," Hawke murmured against Fenris's ear, the soft fluff of his silver hair tickling her nose.

Fenris shuddered in her grasp. "He can hear all of this, can he," he said.

"I'm afraid so." Hawke nosed at his cheek, his jaw tantalizingly close to Anders's lips, and then let him escape when the tension drew him straight again.

"It's too strange, Hawke. It's too -- I'm sorry," Fenris said softly. "I don't know how to -- I can't wrap my head around this."

"But you'll try," Hawke said, and the words were a plea.

Fenris nodded. He turned again, and met her gaze. His eyes were intense in the starlight. "Always," he said.

"You're thinking it serves you right for falling in love with a mage, aren't you?" Hawke said, her smile slow on Anders's lips.

"I'm thinking ... I will not be parted from you again," Fenris said. He stepped forward again, and drew Anders close with the hard pressure of his hand at the small of his back. His fingers curled hard in the taut hair at the nape of his neck. The fierce heat of him was pressed close with a kind of vehement stubbornness that Hawke clearly and physically appreciated.

 _Maker_ , thought Anders on the edge of panic, and not at all the edge of being turned on.

"I will not be that coward again, Hawke," Fenris whispered.

Hawke touched his face, fingertips light against the line of his cheekbone, and down to the soft curve of his lips, warm against Anders's skin. "I'm going to fix it," she said.

Fenris kissed his fingertips. Anders curled his hand into a fist as he drew it back, but Hawke didn't fight him about it.

"All right," Fenris said.

"I love you," Hawke added in a sudden rush of new anxiety, keyed to the drop of Fenris's gaze. "I know I don't say it enough."

"I wish I could hear you," Fenris said, and turned away to walk off across the stone wall. The pale light gleamed across his pale hair, and for a moment Hawke wanted to give chase again, but then she let him go.

She stood there for awhile in silence, waiting until Fenris had disappeared from view and, probably, earshot. Then Hawke filled her lungs on a long breath and shouted, "Fuck!" into the empty sky.

 _You owe me_ , Anders thought seriously.

 _I think you better check the balance sheet again_ , Hawke thought back.

"I will," Anders said aloud, working his shoulders to loosen some of the tension of the last few minutes. "Right after I take a good long look in my mirror."

Even inside his head, Hawke was a terrible loser. 

Anders smiled just a little, and turned out of the cold wind that bit through the night sky to slip back inside the stronghold. He reached up to fix his hair as he went. Hawke had really made a mess out of it.

***

It was getting so late that it was turning early. 

Hawke was slowly coming to the unwilling conclusion that one among many of the issues that tangled her thoughts in these circumstances was that she feared sleep. She felt as though if she closed her eyes and slept that the Fade would rush back to reclaim her and she'd somehow be caught between worlds, caught between awake and asleep, neither a passenger in Anders's body nor a driver in her own. 

Perhaps worse, she felt a pang of fear that if they dreamed together, somehow she'd just be Anders, and that whatever part of her was Hawke would be swallowed up in the twisting mess that was whatever he and Justice had become.

She could feel them, both of them, in her thoughts. At times it seemed that they were the same, as much as Anders ever claimed they were, but at other times it seemed as though they balanced on a thread, on the verge of lashing out. Justice was the part of Anders that hated the noise, that resented her presence, that wished they'd never even tried to pull her from the Fade. Anders was the part of Justice that awaited retribution for his own actions, whose rage fueled his awareness, whose lens of memory took every oppression and made them fit together in a vast jigsaw puzzle of human cruelty, fear, and apathy. 

What she didn't know was how she fit. If she'd become the part of Anders that made snarky comments. If Justice would be part of her, some strange, righteous part that never forgave her for having, say, priorities. 

Anders didn't think it would work that way. But what the hell did he know? 

Hawke slung her arm -- his arm -- across her eyes -- their eyes -- and blew out a long breath, wriggling shoulders back into the pillow she'd folded over to make it into more cushion than the flat pancake it seemed inclined to be on its own. 

"How did it work?" she asked aloud. "You say you blend together, that you're both of you, but I've seen him overcome you. Override you."

It was strange because thinking of it seemed so much harder now. She felt that only recently she'd drawn up the memories, conjured the blue light cracks through Anders's skin, the queer booming of his refracted voice, but now the context seemed blurred and fuzzy, and there was a threat in her gut that she didn't understand, an anxiety that wasn't hers. 

She felt her eyes scrunch tighter.

Anders thought, _Everything he is is bound up in me. I can't tell where he ends and I begin -- if that even happens._

She felt the tension rising and forced them both to roll over, burying their face in the pillow to draw a breath, crushing it with the pressure of Anders's arm. "He's getting cranky," she mumbled. "Talk about something else."

"Anger is what we are," Anders said softly. "It's what I have left. All that came from me."

His body was a long line of tension on the bed, the pillow squashed under his arm, his jaw as hard as a rock as his throat worked in a swallow.

Hawke thought, _That's garbage, Anders,_ because even through ten years of alternating disagreements and aggravation, she could think of so many things about Anders that weren't wrath. Maybe some of them had faded, over the past year or so--.

Or been burned away, and she couldn't tell which of them thought so. She couldn't tell which of them felt the gnawing of despair, knotting in her gut, because it felt so strong, so raw in her throat and behind her eyes.

"Stop it!" Hawke said. She punched the bedframe. It hurt; his knuckles protested. "Maker, you're even worse to yourself and I didn't know that was possible." 

She thrust herself up on the edge of the bed with her hands framing to either side of her hips, glaring down at the floor for a moment with the bow of her head. "Because this isn't even about killing all those people. Of all the things you feel bad about I can't even tell where that rates."

"You're right," Anders said, and he rose to pace the room, bare feet light and quiet over the floor, but energy driving his motion nonetheless. "It's part of it, but it isn't all of it. I don't even know if I'd take it back." 

The thought that followed strengthened him, and it came from neither of them. The thought was, _It was justice._

Hawke could feel it, then; the surety that he wouldn't take it back, that regret was not the same as guilt, that even as he felt sorrow, the sorrow he felt was for having to do it, not that it was done. He could grieve for those who were caught in the crossfire but he still believed with all the passion and fire that burned inside him that what he'd done was justice. That the world had needed it.

She wanted to shout at him that the world hadn't needed it, but the power of his fury was too strong, and she couldn't.

"You're wrong, Hawke," Anders said, and for a moment, just for an instant, Justice was with him in a bright flare of power behind the words. He walked to the window and stood beneath the cold spill of the moonlight across his face, closing his eyes. It was only his own voice with which he said: "The third road, the one you wanted to walk, your precious, righteous compromise?" His eyes snapped open, his hand curling in a fist. "It was always a lie. I had to force them to face it. If I didn't, if I hadn't--"

 _But why those innocents? Why that Divine? Why Kirkwall?_ Hawke wanted to rail at him, as she had never railed at him before.

"It was worse in Kirkwall than anywhere," Anders said, and he turned around, setting his shoulders to the stone wall as he folded his arms. Gaze narrowing, he smiled a cold, terrible smile that was the worse because she felt, rather than saw it, and knew how vicious he meant it to be. "If not there, then where, Hawke? Somewhere you wouldn't have to see? Somewhere you, personally, could avoid it?"

It stung because, at least a little, he wasn't wrong, and it stung worse because not only did she know he was right about that, she could feel him knowing she knew he was right, and oh, Maker, was this ever the worst conversation they had ever had, stripped of all defense, ripped open to a kind of intimacy neither of them had ever wanted.

 _You mean the truth,_ said the cold contempt inside Anders that was Justice, and she was pretty sure he was talking to both of them. 

She smashed her hands against her face, dragged them back into Anders's long loose hair, and said, "I guess it's over now, isn't it? You got your war. You got your change."

 _We'll see,_ Anders thought, a wary, mistrustful thought. 

They'd met Sister Nightingale once. The future looked very progressive for mages. Hawke supposed that Anders was right in thinking it was early to tell, though.

"Do you really think you'll lose yourself if we dream?" Anders asked, as he sat back down on the bed, hands falling to his lap. 

Hawke didn't know, but the question brought the fear back. Tears stung behind their eyes as she thought of the mountain path in the Fade where she'd left herself behind, and how certain she'd been at every moment of every fight that of course she'd find some way, that she'd stay alive. She always did. 

But _this_. This was beyond her grasp. This was beyond even Fade stuff. This was weird beyond the wildest tale she'd heard Varric spin. Of course, now he'd know he'd have to find a way to top this, for next time...

Would she know her dream from his, if they slept? She could mostly tell their thoughts and feelings apart now. Mostly. Sometimes. 

Anders rarely remembered dreams. He tried, and there were mostly scattered fragments, shreds that were banished on waking, but recently, so recently, he'd her voice saying only, _yes_ , and it had meant to him that she was alive, and that had meant everything.

Hawke was quick to joke, "My dreams never mean anything," but the words were an empty patter to cover how hard it hit, the power of that _everything_ , the way it seemed to rise up and claim Anders's whole heart exactly the same way that the rage did, except with ... fewer explosions.

Anders thought, Well, I'm glad there's not anything big I'm missing. 

Letting go of consciousness did not seem like a viable option. Hawke stretched out on the bed and turned their head slightly to look at the window, breath hissing in a long gust past lips like "pffff."

It occurred to Anders that this was just never how he had ever imagined sharing a bed with Hawke.

The thought came with a shred of the imaginary, however quickly Anders tried to quash it. Hawke tilted her head and felt the smile curving her lips involuntarily, even while his cheeks prickled with the hue of embarrassment.

Anders's imagining was, Hawke felt, quite generous, but she'd never purchased a negligee that clung quite like that.

It was Anders's turn to groan, "Stop."

It was absolutely too mean to make the joke about asking him to be her future underwear consultant if ever she had occasion to go shopping in Orlais, and she knew it was too mean, but just having thought it was the same as having made it in the first place. 

_Damn_ , thought Hawke.

"I hate you," Anders said, and she knew exactly how much he was lying and exactly how much he was telling the truth.

This really was awful. It was inevitable, now, that he'd know exactly how much she'd dwelled on the almost of that night before she'd chased him out, how much she'd traced the memory of his lips. Not thinking about it was only going to work for so long, especially in this context, in the long, endless night she was determined not to sleep in.

She couldn't even tell whose uncertainty was whose, which discomfort this was. It was probably both. She opened their eyes wide and stared determinedly at the ceiling and did not think about the weight of his hand, now across his stomach, or the way that she could, if she concentrated, feel their own heat through the thin fabric of the undershirt they'd worn to bed.

 _I didn't know,_ Anders thought. _I didn't let myself think_ , was his next, more accurate thought, as he tried not to be grateful that the fantasy that his idle fancy had spun in the past few minutes was so tame as Hawke swathed in slick satin, lounging beside him in peace as would never have happened in life.

"We shouldn't think," Hawke muttered. "Thinking is terrible. Thinking is the worst thing that either of us ever did."

Hawke almost felt as though they had driven Justice back into hiding by being so aggressively fleshy.

His cock was really not very far at all from his hand, resting innocuously across the fabric. She closed the hand into a fist and tried very hard to pretend that she hadn't just thought so. 

Anders's face was burning. He rolled over onto his side, and punched the pillow a few times to force it back into shape.

His lips formed the words, "I'm sorry," and gave voice to them, and neither of them could honestly tell which of them had spoken. 

Hawke tried to chase this thought away. She tried to think of Fenris, because there were few things more disloyal than this strangest of all temptations to touch and be touched, except that it brought her back to this evening, and the level of desperation that had happened between them on the rampart, and the way it had felt to hold him through Anders, and how hard Anders had tried to not feel it. But inevitably, that brought an uncomfortable recollection of the fantasy that had claimed her so memorably in the Fade, taking them both at once in an absurd impossible tangle of the three of their bodies, and now Anders was just _entirely_ taken aback to the point where disgust had not even started yet, and Hawke felt shame on levels she'd literally never felt before.

"Anders," she said desperately, "Anders, we need wine. Lots of it. Lots of wine."

It took him a long, long time to agree, because he was still boggling over ... that. But at this point, he could think of no other escape from these four walls and the far corners of his own skin, and the rising discomfort that was his awareness that at least one of the people in this body was bordering arousal, and he couldn't entirely tell whether Hawke was trying not to think about teasing his cock or whether he was imagining her thinking about--. 

"Yes," he said firmly, "let's get ... _really_ drunk."


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to teztime and rozzingit for beta reading.

Even at this hour, the tavern was noisier than Fenris preferred. He watched the wine in his glass and wondered, in a vague sort of way, why he hadn't left for the cold and quiet of outside.

Varric was telling the Hawke story, although it wasn't this particular Hawke story. By virtue of his presence at the table, Fenris was more featured than usual. He sipped his drink and narrowed his eyes slightly at the gathered men and women decorating the tavern this late. The Tal-Vashoth had been here but was now gone. Isabela had wandered off upstairs. Fenris didn't know if these were related events, but also found that he had enough to think about without being concerned with what, or whom, Isabela was doing.

In the story Varric was telling, Fenris was raising his sword with tremendous and glowing might while shouting that he was no man's slave.

It was the Tevinter sitting at the table across from theirs who raised his glass to him at this point and said, "Benefaris."

Fenris watched him for a moment, and then raised his glass. "Kaffas," he toasted back.

Krem lifted his head and laughed. Bracing his arm on the arm of his chair, he leaned forward to tink their glasses together.

Just a little, Fenris smiled on the way to draining the glass.

"So then," Varric said, "so then, and it was long, bloody work, I can tell you, as we fought our way through a dozen slavers that seemed to erupt out of the cliffs around us--"

"Always erupting, slavers," said Anders, "I've always said so."

There was a pause. 

No one had noticed him walk up from the bar. Fenris, in the midst of pouring from the bottle, stopped and merely gripped it by its slender neck. Carefully, he didn't squeeze it tight enough to put it at risk.

"Blondie," Varric said, eyebrows up as he lowered his cup and turned his head to look at him, "or Chuckles?"

Anders opened a hand a little helplessly and lifted the heavy mug he'd brought over to take a pull. Then he said, "Why not both?"

Fenris rose. 

Anders winced.

"I've been meaning to get some air," Fenris murmured, as if to soften his immediate flight with the excuse, as if anyone in the entire damned bar didn't know exactly what was happening right now, as if even the illusion of dignity hadn't already been stripped from his grasp. Varric met his eyes and said nothing. Fenris let his glance fall, seeking no one else as he turned and strode for the door.

He heard someone say behind him, "Oh blast, he's taken the bottle," just as the tavern door closed and he fled into the cold of the mountain night.

So Fenris had a bottle of wine with him.

He could have drank it all down, but he didn't. Instead, he found himself holding it loosely against his leg when he finally came to a halt. He sat with his back to the stable door and watched the clouds swirl past the silver gleam of the stars, his head fallen back against the wooden slats.

Years ago, he'd left Hawke out of fear, but it was fear of himself, of what he knew but didn't know, of how powerful and intimate and overwhelming it was; of how much her breath on his skin woke everything inside him, of how much he could lose himself in simply touching her, and of what he might find, in all the broken flashes of memory that the intensity of the experience lightninged through him.

Now, he sat with his back to the stable door and tried not to fear.

Fenris had allowed himself to think that there was one thing in his life that magic couldn't spoil. He had let himself believe that she was the one force in nature who was strong enough to overcome it, to look into the face of temptation and turn aside, probably while making a _terrible pun_ , because he'd seen her do it, time and again. Because what mattered to Hawke was love, not power. For her family. For her home. For her friends. For him.

And now.

She stood there in another man's body and begged him, in another man's voice, not to walk away. 

Fenris hit his head against the back of the stable and closed his eyes.

He'd wondered if it was the magic that had driven him from her bed, that first time. In the long dark of the restless nights that followed, he had asked himself if she had done something to him. Inadvertently, maybe, as she wrapped herself around him, drew him inside her and rode him with the fierce and vehement arch of her hips, if power had spilled from her skin to crackle around them invisibly, if the magic in her blood had inflamed the lyrium in his and cracked the shielding his broken mind had made to protect him from himself.

For awhile, he'd been terrified of that, too. 

He had watched in a fierce riot of jealousy as she'd grown closer to Anders, rage driving him to some truly epic tantrums in the silence and privacy of his empty stolen manor house, but it hadn't become that much better when he watched her pull away from him, striding alone and untouched by either of them. Because through all of it, he was still watching her.

When it was clear that it was too ridiculous to keep hiding from her, still it was far too late to speak his heart, and she seemed airily fine with avoiding it ... and everything more that had ever been between them ... except for a few scattered moments: a look into her eyes that lasted a little too long, a breathless pause where their lips were too close together but far too far apart.

And finally, even though it was too late, he had spoken again.

Fenris wasn't sure she had ever really forgiven him for leaving. Even as she closed her arm around his neck and pulled so tight on his hair he thought it was going to come out by the roots, each time their lips touched she demanded everything from him, every promise his body could be coaxed to offer: are you here? are you with me? will you leave again?

To feel that same demand in Anders's arms was almost unbearable.

He thought of the pain he'd seen in Hawke, through Anders, and buried his face in his hands as he muttered, "Almost."

He sat there for a long time, long enough to admit even to himself that what he was actually doing out here was wallowing in self-pity. The sky was turning gray in an early glimpse of dawn when the sound of quiet footsteps scraping over stone drew him out of the fugue.

Even all the way across the courtyard, he knew who it was in an instant. There was no one who swaggered quite like that.

"What a night," she said, her step a rolling saunter as she meandered across the way over towards him. Her hair was a wild mess of flyaway black as she ran her fingers back through it, shaking it out behind her.

Fenris let his head rest against the door, watching her approach without saying anything.

"How long have you been out here, sweet thing?" she asked him.

Fenris shrugged.

"Do you want to come to bed," Isabela leered at him with familiar, friendly lasciviousness, fists at her hips, "or shall I leave you to the tender mercies of your horse friends?"

Fenris wrinkled his nose and sighed a little as he rubbed his hand over his face.

She held out her hand to him, and he took it, hauling himself to his feet and grasping her forearm in the silent salute of one warrior to another. She slanted him a bright-eyed look in the predawn gloom.

"So glum, sweet thing," she said. 

"I suppose you blame me for that," Fenris said, somewhere between wry and dour. 

"She's alive, she's kicking, and who knows? With the shoe on the other foot, she might learn a few things," Isabela said, and winked. "The runaway mage knows a trick or two..."

"Don't tell me," Fenris rasped at her in aggravation.

Isabela laughed, and kissed his jaw, her breath tickling warmly just beneath the lobe of his ear. "Come on," she said. "Get some rest. From what the great horned lummox was saying, we may have demons to fight this afternoon."

"Demons," Fenris echoed darkly, scowling. 

Isabela made a face. "I know, right? So boring! At least it isn't darkspawn. I hate those."

"Because they're sending her back," Fenris said quietly. "If it works."

"Yep," Isabela said, turning to stride up the path back towards the keep with its guest rooms. "You aren't going to tell me you'll miss Handers. Hawkers? And...k? That sounds like choking."

"It beats some alternatives," Fenris growled, following in her wake with a deep frown etching itself into his expression. 

Isabela grinned over her shoulder at him. "I'm going to remind you you said that, sweet thing." 

***

At some point, they must have slept, because it was getting on towards noon when they opened their eyes, and both of them agreed that hangovers were even worse than thinking.

The inside of their mouth tasted truly vile. Anders's tongue ran around his teeth, and he groaned in a long and wretched moan of the kind that he had not let loose in some time. 

"Come on, Blondie, up and at 'em." 

Hawke was lying on the floor on her back, chewing on Anders's lower lip as she stared at the ceiling. She turned the head, squinting blurrily toward Varric, who was sitting on the edge of a bed and lacing his boots up with the particularly sunny expression of a dwarf who was not at all hung over.

"Maker," she said. "Is this your floor I'm on, Varric?"

"Don't worry," Varric said, springing off the bed as he slung Bianca into place on his back. Standing straight, he slapped them on the back, hard enough to elicit a heavy grunt and a fresh burst of fireworks to lance through their pounding head. "Bianca understands."

"Oh," Hawke said weakly. "Good."

It took her some time to crawl her way to the basin and splash water on their face, and then rinse out her mouth, and then splash more water on their face.

"You know, Anders," she said, "you really don't hold your drink very well."

"Shut up, Hawke," Anders said a beat later.

"Yeah," Varric said, leaning in the doorway and folding his arms over his chest. "You don't sound crazy at all, there."

"Give it time," said Anders, or maybe it was Hawke. Rubbing at their head, they turned and dragged themselves out into the hallway.

***

The air crackled with unspent power. 

Hawke had never had much to do with any kind of ritual summoning. She'd seen its leavings, of course, or faced it in battle, and even witnessed powerful seals that pulsed across decades of time. The raw energy in the air seemed to thrum in time with her pulse, and as she knelt there listening, both quickened.

Anders had studied spirit magic, even some inside the Circle where he was first trained, although the information that he had been able to glean there had been fairly limited on the subject, because most of the tomes with applicable studies were kept chained to the library walls for advanced pupils who did not have his track record for escape attempts and other demerits. He'd learned more since, and still more since Justice. Sometimes he wasn't sure where some of what he knew came from, the way it seemed graven into his memory where he'd never put it, cast in shades and echoes of his own thoughts. 

Justice knew about summonings. Much of what he knew about them was that he didn't like them. 

It was hard not to listen to what Dorian and Fiona explained about the ritual with Justice's ears, with Justice's tension driving them to snap and threaten. Anders had kept cool the last time around when he had been deeply involved in the process, but of course ... that had been for Hawke. This was ... well, it was still for Hawke, but it was very different, and he was raw and hung over and unsettled.

There was an uneasy feeling in Hawke's gut. It was hard to tell if it was aftereffects of all that metabolic poison versus if it was anything more portentous or soul-afflicted. At least no one was had even thought about opening a vein, as far as she could tell. 

Their skin crawled beneath the crackle of the air. The scent of a storm scorched their nostrils. Hawke squeezed their eyes tightly shut, lashes sealing against cheek, and made fists. 

Light blazed in each symbol that had been etched in the floor, blue-white. This time, Anders was not involved in the magic. Although Hawke's spirit and Anders's were both full of magical potential, Dorian and Fiona were both agreed that expecting their participation in the rite was asking for more trouble than it was worth. The other nonparticipants were not in the room; no matter how much Dorian claimed to delight in an audience, Anders insisted that the idea here was less, not more, complication.

He wasn't entirely sure that Hawke could let go if she had all of those people who loved her standing around bleeding anxiety out of their pores.

Hawke disagreed. She'd already bloody well leapt once, and more than once. But there was little point arguing about it. Anders wasn't wrong that the last thing they needed was for someone else to accidentally get sucked into the Fade.

As Hawke opened her eyes, she seemed to see through a veil of green fire. The power seethed and shimmered as it snaked away from the circle, making every hair on Anders's lean body stand on end and prickle with static. She felt a curious distance slowly melting through her, as though she was taking a step back and away from all of the sensations of Anders's body. 

Everything felt remote. She was vaguely aware that physical sensations existed, but they all seemed to matter so much less.

She thought of the mountain in the Fade, the seemingly endless path, hunger, thirst, cold. She thought of hope and despair, pride and cleverness, and a strange lack of fear. She was certain that the end of the road was near and that when she reached it, she could keep her word to Justice -- not the once-Justice creature who she felt as a distant creeping spiny thing in the back of her mind, connected unwillingly to her through the haphazard stitching of Anders and Hawke in the same uncertain flesh, but Justice that lined her staff with golden light in the gloom of the Fade, and helped her strike the final blows against the Nightmare, because it knew a wrong that needed righting when it saw one.

This time when her eyes closed, she felt shapes forming around her. An indistinct shade of stone and magic that instinctively she knew was here, now, the present: a smell of stone and dust underlying the ozone scorch. She felt as though she could pick out flashes of scent and sight even though her eyes were shut, as though she saw and breathed with senses other than the ones she'd been accidentally borrowing. The high cant of Fiona's head as she angled her gaze to the ceiling; a scent of something green and growing; the deep furrow of Dorian's brow in concentration, the scent of soap and spice and old paper; the still tension of Anders, bowed and waiting, carrying the (at this moment) too familiar smell of stale whiskey and aggressive peppermint. 

The wide green mouth of the rift shimmered and shifted, reaching to swallow her. It smelled as fresh and clean as new snow. 

Hawke's eyes snapped open and she stared unseeing through the tongues of green fire that seemed to dance, heatless but bright, around her face. Suddenly certain what she had to do, she reached up and grabbed hold of Anders with both hands.

_Make things right,_ Hawke thought like a whisper.

Even as the cold air of the false Fade stung her cheeks, Hawke drew in a deep breath and, with all her might, _yanked_.

***

"When you say they're _both_ gone, Sparkles," Varric said, "what ... exactly ... do you mean?"

Varric had many voices that Fenris could recognize after all the years they had known each other. This was one that he used when the negotiation could go south at any moment and he needed to be very careful of his words. It was also one he used when dangering with dangerous magic and/or crazy people. That is, crazy people other than Hawke. 

"They're in the Fade," Dorian said. He stood with his arms crossed, hip cocked toward the doorway; his staff leaned behind him up against the wall where he'd set it when he came out to try and explain what had happened. He was a little unsteady on his feet from the sheer expenditure of power; sweat glossed his warm-hued skin, and his hair was a less artful rumple than usual. "We tried pulling Anders back, obviously, but it seems something has a hold of him in there. He, ah ... won't wake up."

"Please tell me this doesn't mean they're both in Hawke or something," Varric said.

"Ah," Dorian said, "well--"

Fenris growled, his hand closing to a fist. He was having a hard time standing still; he shifted his weight rather than immediately lunge at the Tevinter mage and try to shake the life out of him, but it was a close call. 

Varric was sitting down with a book whose pages were mostly blank set out before him, quill pen and ink both evidently forgotten just to the left of his hand. He hadn't written a word since Anders and Hawke had gone into the room with the other mages for the ritual. 

Isabela sat on the table in front of the book, her legs crossed at the knee; she swung her foot, pointing the toe of her boot at Dorian as she tilted her head.

"Look, we all know everything's weird in the Fade, sweet thing, but if anybody's going to be stuck in there with her, isn't it better if it's our runaway mage?" Isabela narrowed her eyes, looking a challenge at Fenris as she said, "At least he's got half a chance of knowing what's going on." 

"I hate--" Fenris started to snarl, and found only sympathy in Isabela's quirked mouth and tilted brows, and only dry recognition in Varric's rueful face. He swung his fist in new frustration that they both knew him so damned well, and cracked it against the near wall to no particular purpose. "I hate not knowing."

"We'll keep trying," Dorian said, amber gaze flickering between the three of them, lingering longest on Varric. "It's all experimental from here. New ground. But I've ... some experience with new ground." He rolled his eyes as he added, "As reassuring as that must sound. Don't give me that," he added to the look on Fenris's face, lifting his hands and then turning back to snag his staff with his bare-shouldered arm. "Hiss and spit at someone else. _I'm_ the only one who's going to get your precious Hawke out of this mess."

As though it was being dragged out of him by a winch, Fenris bit his way through, "Thank you." 

"You're very welcome," Dorian said, about as sincerely, and then strode off back toward the curving stairs to his library roost.

Fenris spun on his heel and started to pace. After a few back and forth repetitions, he snapped, "I _hate_ this."

"You're making me crazy just watching you, Elf," said Varric. 

"Look on the bright side," Isabela suggested. "No demons!"

Fenris ducked his head. "I might prefer some demons," he said.

"Ick," Isabela disagreed, eloquently.

"Bianca might feel better with something to do, too," Varric said, reaching up behind him to touch his crossbow with a reassuring hand.

"Too bad we don't have any Tevinter slavers we could hunt around here. That'd cheer you right up, wouldn't it?" Isabela winked at him.

Fenris turned where he stood and looked silently off the way Dorian had left.

Varric said dryly, "I think he'd object to the comparison."

"Pfft," Isabela said. She swung her legs and bounded down from the table, straightening with a toss of her hair. "I dueled a few rounds in that sparring ring outside earlier," she said. "Why don't you go and see if any of sweet templar Cullen's men thinks they can best you in a fight?"

"I'm just guessing, now, but I think Cullen probably wants them to survive," Varric said, leaning back in the chair and slinging his arm across its back as he eyed Fenris.

Fenris tipped his head to Varric, and then said, "I'm just ... going to go. Sit. Think."

"Self-reflection is _so_ unhealthy!" he heard Isabela say after him as he loped off.

"Leave him be, Rivaini," Varric said with the voice Fenris knew as the storyteller's voice, a narrator of great authority. "When your true love and your greatest rival are trapped on a Fade vision quest together, there comes a time a man just needs to be by himself."


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks again to rozzingit and teztime for much needed grammatical and structural help and also encouragement. I know this chapter has been a long time coming -- I'll try and be faster with the next one!

Her whole body seemed to throb, as if the flow of blood through her veins triggered a twinge of ache wherever it went. Her skin prickled with the bite of the snow. She sat up and scrubbed at her face with both hands before dragging them back through her hair.

“Just what did you think you were going to accomplish?”

The voice boomed and sneered. She peeked through the cage of her fingers from her seat on the trampled snow and squinted at the cracks of brilliant light that shimmered and glowed from every inch of Anders’s body. She could still read the glower of his expression despite the obscuring brightness, and, from somewhere, fetched a sunny smile to aggravate him with as she dropped her hands.

“Justice,” she said. “Long time no see. Oh, wait--”

“You were an intruder,” Justice said. He stood as solid as any statue in the Fade, his feet planted wide, his features blazing with more disgust than any other emotion.

“Not on purpose,” Hawke said. She pushed herself up on her knees, and then from her knees to standing in a stumbling, awkward unfolding of throbbing limbs, but at least her body was responding to her, and this frozen stiffness and these aches belonged to _her_ , whole and entire. “And honestly I think I was invited. I don’t think I could have crashed that party on my own.”

Justice glared at her and said nothing.

Hawke bent down again and unearthed her staff from the snow. Spinning it in her hands, she sent a dusting of white frost falling from it in all directions and then cracked it hard against the ground. She returned Justice’s glare with high swept brows and a cheeky smile, which she knew from very recent memory should aggravate him a lot more than an actual glare.

She said, “Speaking of intrusions. I've cleared out. Don't you think it's about time you left?"

Justice brought up his head. “Ah,” he said. “Yes. I suspected that would be next. You have no idea what you are doing.”

Hawke let her staff relax a little in her hands as she eyed him. “That’s never stopped me before,” she said. 

Justice did not respond to this. 

Hawke sighed a little. "Tough crowd. Not even a snort."

Justice said, “No.”

“No wonder Anders’s sense of humor has been bleeding out of him by inches for the last ten years,” Hawke said judiciously. “What else about him have you consumed, Justice?”

“I consume nothing. You understand nothing. We are bound and our actions are our own. Do you imagine if you find some way of splitting us in this place that somehow his guilt will be _absolved_?” Justice took a step forward towards her, his jaw tense, his boot crunching heavily into the snow.

“No,” Hawke said, “but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea.”

“We have committed crimes and they belong to us both,” Justice said. “Before I knew Anders it would never have occurred to me to justify the deaths of the innocent with the deaths of the guilty, Hawke. Before we came together, it would never have occurred to me to lie to a friend to gain her help. Yet I could feel you, blaming me for every sin on his soul.”

Hawke bared her teeth. “Do you think that blaming Anders absolves you of all those deaths, spirit?” She raised her staff and fire blazed at the end of it, flames held in abeyance rather than blasted into him.

“There is no absolution. There is no forgiveness.” Justice stared at her with so much loathing warping his power-cracked features that she almost flinched. Almost. “You even denied us justice. It was ours to die that night in Kirkwall, to die for what we had done.”

“No,” Hawke said. “It was yours to live with it.”

Frustration plain in the snap of his echoing voice, Justice demanded, "Why is that _your_ choice?" He advanced toward her in high dudgeon but somehow the tension in his fists read to Hawke's eye like he wanted to grab her by the collar and shake her more than anything more violent.

Fair enough. Lots of people reacted to Hawke that way. She probably just had one of those faces.

"Anders gave it to me," Hawke said, "whether I wanted it or not. So I chose." She lifted her chin, widening her eyes at him, and turned her staff in the air, menacing him with it just a little. "Give him the chance to do the same."

"We both chose long ago," Justice answered her, shaking his head. He cut the air with his hand, glowing skin flashing so close to her nose that he almost made her flinch. "Anders doesn't need you to undo our work. We are Anders. We are Justice."

 

"Let him out, Justice," Hawke said. The flames poured out of her staff. 

Justice deflected them with a flare of power, the bubble of his shield coming with the lift of his arms. 

"We are one and the same," boomed Justice, as the shield shimmered around him. He didn’t even hold a Fade simulation of Anders’s staff. She was challenging the Fade creature on his own ground.

Except for one thing. He was still bound. If she could get Anders awake—

"You warp everything, even justice and mercy, to revolve around you," Justice growled. Surely Anders had made that complaint a dozen times. Where _was_ the line of demarcation between them? Was she wrong to be doing this?

He summoned up ice and blasted her with it. She didn’t have time to defend aside from the lift of her arms to protect her face. For terrible, painful heartbeats, she was frozen in place, and he summoned up another blast of ice to hit her with as soon as she broke free of the cold. Breath puffed in front of her, steaming, as she dove forward inside his reach, and summoned a stunning blast of force in an outward circle to throw him back.

Justice cracked backward into the angled wall of the mountain, and before he could react, she hauled back and punched him in the face with all the force she could put behind her fist.

Justice growled, shaking his head and trying to shove her off, but while she was _certain_ Anders had been in a bar fight before, the spirit creature inside him seemed to be having a lot more trouble navigating a form of combat that didn’t involve blasting elemental energy at people. 

Which was good. 

It was very good. 

There was a monumental drop only a few feet behind Hawke’s feet. 

“This is foolishness, Hawke. You can’t separate us. It can’t be done.”

“Can’t it?” Hawke threw another punch and then, as he tried to get her into a grapple to use his superior, demon-led strength against her, drove her knee hard into his stomach. Justice staggered back with a whuff of surprise that sounded a lot more Andersian, and there was a heartbeat where the blue light that cracked his skin in a hundred places seemed to flicker.

“He works so hard to avoid the Fade,” Hawke said. “When we first started working together I just thought he was like me. You know. I hate Fade stuff.” She clasped both her hands around the staff and brought it around to wham across his back and send him crashing to the snow. she grunted with the effort, and then spun the staff above her head like she was going to hit him with enough force to smash his skull with the knobbly bit on the end. 

Justice kicked out, sending up a spray of snow even as his boots smashed into her shins and sent her stumbling. She used the staff to catch herself, but the force of impact drove it hard into the mountain, wedging its end between snow and ice and crags of rock.

“But then,” Hawke panted, winding both her hands around the suspended length of staff, “we went to the Fade, and I met you. In the flesh. For the first time. Walking him around like a creepy marionette.” She drove the staff further into the stone, and as Justice blasted her with another burst of ice, she used it to swing, cracking both her feet into his chest and driving him onto his back in the snow.

“And I wondered,” Hawke said, kneeling and putting a knee to his neck, “eventually. _Eventually_. Why. Why you would work so hard to keep him from himself in the Fade. Why you would make sure he would do everything he could to avoid it.

“But this is where mages have power, isn’t it, Justice?” She brought the glow of energy to her hands and smiled down at him in the beginnings of triumph, seeing what she thought looked like fear somewhere in those glowing eyes. “This is where he could tell you to leave. If you let him make a choice.”

Hawke wasn’t even sure how Justice threw her out of the hold, but somehow she was flying back in a burst of magic. Power singed her hair, licking over her back in vivid orange flames. She couldn’t quite interpret whatever Justice roared at her, but the magical fire was eating into the snow and slickening the stone beneath, making it treacherous. 

She tried to scramble to her feet and it took three tries to get upright, dodging and leaping to try and avoid the bursts of power. 

"You speak like I rob Anders," Justice said. He turned in the steady stream of attack as he advanced. The sequence was fire, ice, fire, ice, flashing through the air in an almost methodical rhythm as he spoke. "I am Anders. I am Anders and righteousness. I am Anders and certainty. I am Anders and guilt. This is me. He has never asked to abandon that. He chose. _We chose._ "

“So is this how spirits act, Justice?” Hawke taunted him a little breathlessly as she dodged and rolled. “Or what was the difference between you and a demon again?”

Justice roared like the breaking of a dam: “I AM NO DEMON.”

The force of his shout seemed to blast her backward, raw with anger and despair. It smote the mountainside, and snow shivered and tumbled around them. Gouts of it fell off stony crags above to collapse across them both. The world went white with snow. Hawke swam upward through it until her head broke again through its surface into the green-lit Fade.

Gasping for air, Hawke peeked down over the side of the mountain and saw a rock fall. It was still falling after she looked away and looked back again.

Pissing him off was all well and good, but it didn’t actually seem to be helping. Maybe there was another way.

As Justice hauled himself up out of the snow by main force, the idea blossomed in her mind. She could feel the grin spreading across her face. It felt a little mad.

“Varric will never believe me if this works,” Hawke said.

***

Anders slept like a dead man.

He was stretched out on top of the covers, his head canted at a limp angle half-smashed in the pillows. He didn’t wake when he was lifted from the floor; he didn’t wake when he was hauled across Skyhold back to the bedroom; he didn’t wake when Fenris slung him down across the bed like so much dead weight.

He still wasn’t awake. Fenris sat uncomfortably on the chair, one leg hooked over its arm, the toes of his other bare foot twisting against the cool stone of the floor, the spikes of his armor grinding back into the thin layer of cushion between the hard wood of the chair’s back and its occupant.

Fenris wasn't sure how long he had been here. It felt like lifetimes. It was probably only hours. He wanted to break something. Preferably, he wanted to break Anders. But not until he was absolutely certain that Hawke didn't need him, which ... was the crux of the issue, wasn't it.

“You all right, Elf?”

“I’m fine.” Fenris didn’t look up at Varric, but continued to stare at the slack features of his sometime enemy.

“You want company?” Varric asked.

Fenris said nothing for a long time, staring at Anders’s face. It wasn't that he wanted Varric to go away _exactly_. But he didn't feel like he had anything to say. 

The sliding scrape of the dwarf’s footstep on the floor told him that Varric was starting to move off, taking silence for refusal.

Abruptly Fenris demanded: “Did you see his mouth move?”

Varric turned back. “What?”

“The mage. His lips moved.” If it was possible to bore holes in a surface by staring at it, Anders would have been sleeping through bleeding out the face. Fenris was certain. He was even … halfway certain what word the sleeping lips had shaped.

“Uh,” Varric said, squinting between Anders and Fenris. “I didn’t—sorry, I didn’t see anything.”

Fenris resisted the urge to holler rage or throw anything at Varric. He sat there, instead, silent and vigilant.

Anders’s lips moved again.

_Hawke._

It could have been a dozen other words, probably. Fenris wasn’t a lip reader. But at the present moment, he couldn’t think of any other words. His mind had probably lost whole languages’ worth of other words. _Damn you, Anders. Damn you, Hawke._

“Did you see it?” Fenris said.

“Yeah.” Varric sounded unnerved.

“Go ask the Tevinter what it means,” Fenris said in a voice fraught with low heat.

Varric risked life, limb, or at least painful injury to his hand by finding a place to touch Fenris on the back – near where shoulder met neck, a whisper of warmth at a point where tension drew him so tight he was on the verge of breaking.

Then, for once quiet, Varric left.

Fenris stayed behind, and glared.

Anders slept on.

***

Leaving her staff wedged into the stones and half-buried in the new scatter of snow from above, Hawke strode towards Justice with purpose driving her steps. She called, “Anders.”

As she closed on him, Justice seemed to form the staff out of the ether around them, to slice into the snow underfoot and send a blast of stunning force towards her. She braced, both arms lifting in a warding gesture, and then, before he could spin the staff to send another spell flying her way, she dove into a roll over the snow, coming to her feet again before him and slamming both her hands into his shoulders.

“Anders!” she shouted in Justice’s face.

“We _are_ Anders,” Justice snarled at her. The blaze of his energy was clear and unwavering in the bright glow of his eyes, in the interwork of webbed power that wrote itself over skin as over armor and cloth.

Hawke said, “Oh yeah?” and pushed back, sliding her hand over the feathered pauldron to find the heat of skin and tickle of hair at the back of his neck.

“What are you—“ Justice started to demand in vehement discomfort.

Hawke flung her other arm around him, tilted her head, and claimed his mouth as she shoved into him.

It was like kissing an electrical storm and for the hammer of heartbeats she thought that it was going to do nothing except aggravate and/or sexually harass an abomination, and that this would really be the stupidest way to die that she’d ever come up with, and she’d come up with some doozies.

But it was Anders whose breath mingled with hers, Anders whose hand cradled her face. His touch was all wonder, no fury, his fingers so light against her skin they might as well be ghosts.

“Hawke,” he whispered in a rasp. For a moment they stood there in almost perfect stillness, his forehead resting against hers, his lashes fallen low over his eyes.

Hawke scrambled for something to say, completely at a loss, and damned if she’d ever admit that to anyone if she ever told this story. She started to say: “Anders, you have to—“

Anders’s hand grew firmer at her cheek as he drew her in and kissed her again. The need that yearned in him called to her despite everything. His mouth was heat and salt and he might have meant tenderness in the kiss but its ferocity overtook him too quickly. He stepped forward into her, crushing his arm across her back, tangling his fingers through the dark rumple of her hair.

He wanted her enough to drive back a spirit of the Fade. In the Fade.

It had been a calculated risk, to bring him back to himself. But even this was too much. She thought of the pain she could imagine in Fenris’s eyes, and ducked her head away. She hadn’t really thought of how cruel this would be until this moment, and in these overlapping seconds it was almost as though she could feel the heady beat of his desire in her own heartbeat.

She thought, _Oh, shit._

“Anders—“ she said, and her breath was more ragged than she expected, husking over the syllables.

But in the moment she withdrew, the blaze of Justice’s power lit him again. He roared with incandescent rage, and Hawke didn’t have time to react before the demoniac strength in his limbs had lifted her from her feet and pitched her into the air toward the near endless drop that was the mountainside.

The last thing Hawke heard before she went over the edge was Anders’s voice. He shouted, “Hawke!”

***

Hawke’s body cracked against the cliff and she dug in her hands with all her might. She fell and rolled and fell some more, bouncing against rock and stone, bruising ribs and smashing her shoulder so hard as she pitched against the rock she was sure that it had to have cracked or dislodged or _something_.

In the end, she dangled from a promontory by both arms, her feet dangling over a sheer drop that seemed to find the ground so far below that she could barely see it. Vertigo seemed to strike her as a physical blow and she squeezed her eyes shut and tipped her head forward.

“Ugh,” she groaned.

For a long time, nothing happened. She started trying to haul herself up but accomplished nothing but changing the dull burn of her muscles to a scream of pain and protest as she tried to shift her weight.

“Maker,” Hawke muttered. “This … was not what I had in mind.”

The occasional quiver rippled through her arms. She swung her legs, back, forth, back, forth, trying to gain purchase on the stone, but she was just too far out over nothing, and she had to give it up when a flicker of her gaze caught some pebbles falling, falling, falling . . .

Hawke froze, her breath stuttering in her throat, and stared straight ahead and above at the edge of the promontory above her.

She half-expected Justice to give chase and finish her off, but no. All was quiet but for the whistle of the wind and ragged sound of her own breathing. She tried to stay calm. She tried to force her hands to move so that she could work toward some kind of--

Something scrabbled, like claws graveling over stone. 

"Oh, Maker, it's going to be a shriek or something," Hawke said. "Look, I'm having a perfectly good near death experience on my own, I don't need any, not looking! Go away!"

There was another scrabble.

Hawke slung her hand loose from the promontory only to smash it quickly back again when she felt her balance teetering precariously on the support of an arm that was already trembling with the effort. Every second she spent in this precarious dead hang was a second closer to falling to certain doom.

"Are you sure?" said a voice, and then the strangely quizzical pale rodent face of a nug was peeking out at her sideways from the edge of the promontory.

Hawke stared at it blankly for a moment.

"Are you the same spirit I saw before?" she said. 

The nug made a show of cleaning its whiskers with its paws. "You made a bargain with a spirit," it said. "Is this how you keep it?"

"Well," Hawke said, her brow creasing as she dangled by her arms from the precipice, "it might be how I die trying? I mean, I'd prefer not."

"Do you want to die?" the nug asked. 

"No! I mean. Really no!" Hawke tried to haul herself up again and was forced to stop.

"Would you die to make things right?" the nug asked.

"Only if I really, really knew it would help!" Hawke gabbled quickly, kicking her legs and flailing.

The nug tilted its head the other way, and there was a scrabbling noise as it clawed thoughtfully at the stone. Then it spoke again. It said: "That's interesting."

Then it melted into a swirling gust of snow. 

***

Anders stared into the depths of nothing over the side of the mountain and felt, for the first time in years, not at all crowded, but instead, hollow. There was nothing inside him. There was no justice. No vengeance. There was not even enough comprehension for despair.

He knelt. 

_I was defending us,_ Justice said.

Anders said nothing.

_If she had killed us in the Fade, there would be nothing left but tranquility. You know that._

Anders let his knuckles brace against the cold rock at either side of his knees and continued to stare down into the depths.

_We swore that we would never let that happen,_ Justice insisted.

"It still won't," Anders said softly. "We won't be Tranquil. We'll just be here."

Anders felt the sudden anguish and fear of his longtime inner self, rising up around him in a blaze with so much intensity that the snow around his knees began to melt into a fluid trickle of wet. But the part of him that was Anders, the part of him that was here and now and in control, was still empty. It was as though he was having this conversation, these thoughts, these feelings, from so far away that they no longer made any sense to him.

Anders said, "I will walk through the Fade until I find her again."

_You won't!_ Justice said. 

"Then I'll be walking for a long time." Anders bowed his head and closed his eyes. "You don't have to stay."

_There is still work to do,_ Justice said. 

Anders said nothing. For a moment, there were two of him, kneeling beside himself in the frozen and greenlit world of the mountaintop.

Justice was appalled. "There are still mages to protect. There is still injustice to fight. You can't simply give up and stay in here."

It started to snow. 

***

Hawke felt chagrined for ever expecting help from any Fade creature, let alone a cryptic fat rodent. She closed her eyes again, took a deep breath, and started swinging her feet again, trying with all her might to reach the edge of the cliff as she kicked out.

There was a distant crack.

Her eyes snapped open.

There was another weird, clanging noise, like metal bouncing against stone. It was getting closer. She tilted her head up, and saw, flying toward her as it bounced and rolled along toward the edge of the cliff, her staff. Flinging out her hand without thinking, she caught it.

Then she blasted beneath her with a spell of telekinetic force and sent herself flying up into the air. She blasted force behind her again to control her fall and found herself crashing to a dull halt where she fell into a heap in the snow.

Dazed, Hawke lay there and stared into the green sky.

A long time seemed to pass before she finally started moving again. When she began, she hauled herself, staggering and exhausted, to her feet. 

There was a golden glowing figure sitting on a boulder tucked up against the side of the mountain. Its elbows were hooked against its thighs, its hands neatly clasped between its knees. 

"You again?" Hawke asked.

"Are you ready?" asked the spirit. 

***

Anders turned his face into it, letting the individual flakes of white fall against his skin, catch in his eyelashes. For a moment, he knelt there, thinking nothing, saying nothing, feeling nothing, being nothing.

As he drew in his next breath through his teeth, he thought it tasted cold, crisp, and sweet, like water on a parched tongue.

Behind them, Hawke said: "There's more than one way to fight, you arrogant, self-righteous, overbearing--"

Anders's eyes snapped open. His heart leapt. He moved so quickly he almost lost his balance and tumbled from the cliff.

For a disorienting, terrifying moment, he was seeing out of two pairs of eyes as he choked, "Hawke--!" 

For a moment, she stood there leaning on her staff like it was all that was holding her up, but she seemed to shimmer like she was gilded in sunlight, and then the golden burst of a figure that was the echo of her own body stepped forth out of her. 

His body was suddenly lit with white-hot pain, as though every healing he had ever undertaken were coming out of the past to wreak their vengeance on his mortal spirit. His vision blurred with tears as he staggered forward.

A circle of rage demons sprouted from the snow, blazing in flame and surrounding them. Hawke shouted, "Oh for the love of--" 

Then Justice, suddenly standing beside him, in a brilliant blue echo of Anders's body, raised his staff.

The next few minutes were a confusion of snow and magic and fire and ice. Anders tried to fight, but he found quickly that he was too weak, as if every last shade of magical energy had already been sucked out of him, and his strength was sapped as Justice methodically blasted and fought his way through the demons. Anders felt like he was about to fall over, but Hawke was there, ducking under his arm and holding him up even as she turned and blasted a demon with an icy fist of magic.

"What, do you need a nap?" Hawke demanded as he lurched against her.

He couldn't come up with more to say than, "Rrgh."

The golden false Hawke and the brilliant blue false Anders rounded at the same time on the last of the demons and detonated it in a scattered shower of ice. The snow blew around them on a howling wind.

"So it was," said the golden spirit. "Vengeance."

Justice dropped his hands to his sides and let the staff fall to dissipate in a glowing cloud that faded quickly from the surface of the snow. He said: "All I ever wanted was to make things right."

The golden afterimage of Hawke held out her hand and said: "This is how."

"Justice," Anders whispered, and it was as though feeling had exploded back into his body again, in a tide of grief and loss so profound he struggled to even understand it. He started to move forward.

Justice turned his head to look at him and, as his blue brilliance started to fade into the greenish-tinted air, shook his head. He said: "Enough, old friend." 

"I never meant--" Anders started to cry out.

But they were both gone in the next heartbeat. 

Then Hawke collapsed into the snow. 

It was the last thing Anders saw before he felt the anchor holding him into the Fade beginning to slip, the pull of his own body far distant dragging him back.

"Hawke!" Anders called.

Then all the world went white.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to rozzingit and teztime for the beta, AND. Thank you to people still reading this for bearing with me. Work's been wild and I know this chapter took a long time in coming. I hope you like it!

Before Anders was entirely awake, he already felt empty. 

Needlepoints of red light seemed to reflect against his eyelids. He clenched them tighter shut as he drew in a long breath, and then smeared his hand over his face. Beard stubble prickled under his palm. His head seemed to echo. He reached, reflexively, for the connective power that had sustained him for so long, and found nothing.

He reached for the Fade, and felt nothing but the drained, burnt feeling of a mage overextended. It throbbed behind his eyes, between his temples. He dropped his hand and opened his eyes.

The ceiling was barely familiar, blurring in and out of focus as he tried to sort out his surroundings. He almost couldn't understand the figure he saw looming over the edge of his bed, staring down at him with intense eyes.

"Hawke?" demanded Fenris.

Anders closed his eyes, swallowed, and then opened them again. He cast about for how to answer, and finally just said, "No." 

Fenris growled and turned aside from the bed, feet padding across the room as he stalked away, only to revert to pacing. The energy that drove his steps bled tension from every line of him. Anders turned his head against the flattened pillow and stared at the wall instead.

He felt a curious lack of reaction, as though his heart was so emptied out that there was no room for anger or annoyance. He wondered if this was tranquility for a heartstopping moment of terror and thrashed his way upright in the bedclothes, only to realize in a breathless rush that if it were, he couldn't be afraid of it.

Fenris's head whipped around, attention caught by the sudden motion. He started back toward the bed again.

Anders cradled his head in his hands and said, "No. Still me." 

Harsh and hoarse, Fenris's voice was all breath when he answered: "Then she's gone." 

"She's ... in the Fade. She's not _gone_." Anders struggled with his balky memory, a shiver rippling down his spine. He'd seen her fall. The last thing in the Fade that had seared itself across his eyes was her collapse into the trampled snow. He could hear the waver in his own voice as he said, "She's not gone."

Fenris was across the bedroom again in an instant, his fingers twisting into the thick fabric of the robe that Anders had apparently been put to bed in, ripping upward as he hauled him up by main strength. Anders felt himself drawing on his bereft magical resources, calling on energy that wasn't there to defend himself from the incoming maniac. Nothing happened. No magic. His heart thumped in a kind of reflexive terror. _No magic._

Fenris stank of wine and dread. His eyes blazed. "Tell me," he snarled.

Reflexively, Anders balked, trying to break the hold with a backward thrust that slammed his shoulders hard into the carved wooden headboard. Fenris pulled him forward and smashed him against it a second time. Pain jolted from the back of his head and creaked through his spine as his body was forced to feel, function, respond. It almost felt good. It felt clean. He snapped, "Let go." 

For a moment, Anders expected further violence from the rage and pain in the elf's drawn face. Fenris was almost perfect in his stillness. Then, very slowly, his fingers eased. He bowed his head, and his body wilted. He leaned on the brace of his hand against the headboard above Anders's head, his knee tilted against the side of the bed, and said in a voice as soft as a plea, "Tell me what happened." 

Anders would be hard put to remember what, exactly, he said to explain the last few dire minutes of the Fade. He struggled with the story as he had never struggled with any words in his life. Fenris listened in silence, except for the ragged edges of his breath, until Anders came to the stammered, painful end.

He said, "I thought-- I thought I saw her fall." 

Fenris was still silent. His hand closed into a fist, but then released again in a loose uncurling of his fingers. He drew a long breath through his nose, held it for a few heartbeats, and then wrenched himself away from the headboard.

His voice gone very remote and flat, he said: "She meant to do it." 

"What?" Anders said.

Fenris stared at him, his face writ unreadably in disbelief and horror and maybe something else. He said, "To cure an abomination. She thinks-- she _actually thinks_ she can unwork the horrors that magic--" He broke off, turning on his heel and driving his fist into the stone wall of the room with startling force.

"This doesn't change anything about what I've done or what I--" Anders started to say.

"She's given herself to it. The one thing it didn't spoil." Fenris's voice broke. He shook his head.

"You idiot," Anders said in a fresh spark of temper as he watched the elf cringe away from the wall and start out the door. He rolled out of the bed and stood on weak legs that almost folded beneath him. He said, "Hawke hasn't _given_ anything, she's not _gone_ , she's just ... just in the Fade, like before--"

Fenris turned his head and looked at him with a glare that was hot with fury, but so bright with unshed tears that Anders lost what he was saying in the meeting of their gaze, brought up short.

"For _you_ ," Fenris snarled at him, and then he was gone. 

Time passed, although how much time was hard to tell, because he wasn't entirely sure how much of it he was conscious for.

Anders's body was weak. His mind fizzed with exhaustion. He kept trying to reach for magic that wouldn't answer his call. He wasn't sure, but from the tone of some of the voices he could make out just beyond the door to his room it sounded like Cassandra was being prevented from arresting him again. 

Dorian brought him a lyrium infusion, the liquid glowing gently blue and smelling sharply of an unspent storm. The Tevinter spent a solid hour asking him questions that left him feeling all the more drained, sitting on the edge of the bed and apparently trying to absorb every second of his experience secondhand.

Only the return of the elf banished the Tevinter. When he came back, Fenris stood with his feet planted wide just inside the doorway and watched them with narrowed eyes. His arms folded across his chest, the spiky edges of his dark armor seeming only to heighten the impression of tension taut along the line of his back and his shoulders. Silent, he stood there until Dorian grew unnerved in his investigation and took his leave.

Fenris didn't move to let him by, standing there like a gargoyle. Dorian had to ease past him in order to escape. 

The silence weighted between them, Anders sat on the bed and frowned up at him.

Fenris finally said: "How long before we can try again?"

Anders opened his hands. The lyrium infusion had brought some familiar echo of his old magical strength back into his blood, but he still could barely form a spark from his fingertips. He said, "I don't know. I think that's what he was trying to figure out."

Fenris scowled. "Hawke is trapped in the Fade and you're just lying around in here taking your ease while the Tevinter feeds you grapes."

Anders started to snap something, stung by a combination of the injustice of this remark and the grain of truth it wrapped. He controlled the impulse, watching the contained anguish in Fenris's expression. He recognized his bitter snipery for the pointless thrashing it was. "Well?" he said instead. "What are you doing in here exactly?"

Fenris's lips pulled back from his teeth in a wordless snarl. "Hnh."

"The Tevinter's ritual is the closest we've gotten so far," Anders said. "It ... didn't work exactly as planned--"

Fenris barked "Hah!", and then burst into sudden motion as though propelled by the observation into renewed pacing. 

Anders felt as though just watching him was making his head hurt. Resting his knuckles against his temples, he said, "What _are_ you doing in here?"

Fenris was silent through another few steps, and then stopped with a hand flattened to the wall. He said, "Whatever she did in there ... you're the only piece of this puzzle I have. The last time she was free of the Fade, she was inside you."

Anders felt a little thrill of disturbance winding down his spine and found himself drawing one of the pillows into his arms. He glared at Fenris over the top of it. "She's not here now," he said.

"If she were," Fenris said in a low, tense voice, threaded with a clear note of desperation, "it would be enough. I'd call it enough. If she were free."

Anders thought about it. " _I_ wouldn't," he said. Fenris started to snap something at him, and Anders forestalled him with the lift of a hand. "Neither would she," he said. "Trust me on this one." 

Reduced to another dark little growl, Fenris shook his head and pushed off from the wall. 

Anders smeared his hand over his face. "Pavus suggested I take some more rest," he said. "He was going to send a letter ... somewhere. Maybe try to get some more insight."

"A _letter_ ," sneered Fenris with a harsh snap of frustration. "While Hawke is-- is--"

"You could try resting, too. You're about to explode," Anders said.

Fenris growled, "You would know."

Anders leaned back, crushing the pillow to his chest as he rested his head against the board. His hair loosened from its tail fell forward to tickle around his jaw and neck. Weary, he said: "She's not _here_ now, Fenris."

Fenris glared at him for a moment, and then turned and strode for the door with a prickled snap of, "Fine."

When he was gone, Anders closed his aching eyes. He had never felt so tired, but so far away from sleep.

*** 

Fenris took a turn in the courtyard where several of the men were working out together, but it got a little out of hand. He went from working off steam to halfway to berserk and ended up flipping one of them ass over teakettle into the stone wall nearest. A rain of dust clouded around the man from his impact into the stones. Fenris slapped some of the dust away from himself and a little sheepishly offered his erstwhile foe an arm up.

"Ow," the man said, and grinned up at him.

Fenris grunted something as he hauled the soldier to his feet, and a couple of his friends came over to slap him on the back, muttering and laughing a little.

"They're probably lucky they're still alive," Varric said, hitching Bianca back into place at his back as he loped over from some of the freestanding targets nearby. He braced his hands at his hips, thumbs tucked into the edges of his belt, as he looked up at Fenris. 

Fenris shrugged. 

"Come with me, Elf. I want to show you something." 

Fenris said nothing, but fell in step at Varric's side, scuffing one bare foot over the soft, cool earth of the courtyard. The sun sank slowly beyond the walls as they moved, and Varric said, "You know, I never thought I'd get used to this place. It's nothing like home. I've been here, what, a year, and I can still get lost in some of these warrens. It's an old place. The Inquisitor's been renovating ever since we got here, but it still feels old." 

"Old, but not Tevinter," Fenris said. Talking felt like unusual effort, but if he didn't answer, Varric would probably just keep going indefinitely.

"No, not Tevinter. Not dwarven, either. Not this far up in the sky. Chuckles -- this elf who was with us, he found it, and there's an ancient elven relic here." Varric led him through stone-lined paths and curving stairs.

When they reached the high chamber centered by a shimmering mirror, the tall windows to either side of it looked out on a world falling into darkening night. The first stars were beginning to pierce the dusky cloak of evening. The mirror stood quiescent, but for the fact that it was clearly whole and intact, and showed no signs of displaying a reflection. 

Fenris saw it, and swore reflexively.

"I know, right?" Isabela slipped out from the shadows by the window. "He's even sent Kitten a message about it now." 

Fenris rounded on Varric in surprise. "You--"

"Hey, don't look at me like that. We went through that mirror." Varric jerked his chin towards it. "From an ancient ... elven lake ... thing. It was weird. The point is, the crazy witch who knew how to use it is long since gone, but _Daisy_ spent years trying to learn how to restore one of these--"

"With _blood magic_ ," Fenris said. "She consorted with demons. She was obsessed. She was exiled from her damned _Clan_ over one of these blasted things--"

"Yes, I know, I was there," Varric said with a hyper-animate gesture of both hands. "What'd you go and tell him like that for, Rivaini?"

Isabela leaned back with her spine set against the edge of the windowsill, hip slanted against its ledge, and crossed her legs at the boots. "You think he'd like it better if you tell a nicer story about it, sweet thing?" She smiled. "Would you trust in Merrill's magic to bring Hawke home, Fenris? You were ready to trust in Anders."

Fenris, about to fly into another rage, went very still instead, his hands closing into fists so tight they were nearly knots of anger and bone. 

"The raven we sent had a long way to go," Varric said. "She and Carver were on the road to Weisshaupt. I don't know about you, Elf, but I'm out of ideas."

Isabela pulled a wineskin from where she'd sashed it to her hip and drew its seal out with her teeth. "I've got one," she said with a mouthful of stopper, and smiled around it as she offered it across the distance between them.

Fenris lifted his hand, although he wasn't sure whether he was about to take the drink or slap the skin out of her hand, when another voice spoke out of the shadows.

"Spray in the air, wind in my face, sweat on my skin, flying, soaring, reaching," said the soft voice. "There's kinds of freedom. Regret none of them." 

"I never do," Isabela said, tossing the cork in the air and catching it. 

"Oh, it's you, Kid," Varric said, some of an initial freeze leaching from his shoulders. "We've got to work on your hellos."

"Hello," said Cole. He smiled, hopefully.

"Right," said Varric. "Well. Close enough." 

Fenris closed his hand around the wineskin and took a swallow from it. It was a sharp, smoky red that seemed to evaporate quickly on his tongue. The odd youth made him unsettled; he shifted, angling a few loping steps a little away from him. 

"It hurts," Cole said. He tilted his head up, angling to look at Fenris beneath his hat. "Even when you stop running, choose to stay, there's more to fear. How do you be free?"

"Stop," Fenris snapped.

Cole stopped, his face falling beneath the broad shade of the brim of his hat, even as Varric said, "Kid, you know we've talked about this."

"I can help," Cole said. His body language shifted, growing more diffident, as he scuffed a step back.

"If you want to help," Fenris snarled, "tell me where she is, _spirit_." 

"Spirit or no, I'm Cole now," Cole said, quiet and firm in this affirmation. He drew himself straighter. "You won't forget, and I'll remember, too. She's in the Fade, in dreams of snow. Dreamers call the wakeful. She's calling you. She calls you all. She'll find you."

Fenris took another pull from the wineskin and then held it out for Isabela's open hands as she moved toward him. He muttered another curse.

"Such optimism," Isabela said. She took another pull, and passed the wineskin to Varric.

"The kid knows things, sometimes. Things he ... shouldn't know. No, it's all right, Kid," Varric said when Cole seemed like he might be about to protest, or apologize, or otherwise move. "It's all right. Just ... we've got to work on your boundaries."

"Some boundaries are thin," Cole said. "Here is very thin. I'm not frightened," he added gravely, "but it's all right if you are. I wouldn't come back this way."

The next time Fenris looked, the boy was gone again. He rubbed at his eyes, and cast a wary look at the shimmering surface of the mirror. "When that foolish witch brings a host of demons out of that cursed thing," he said, "you may regret bringing her here." 

"I don't pretend to understand any of this, which means I'll have a hell of a time turning any of it into a story anyone would believe," Varric said, "but we used that thing to ... leap out of the Korcari Wilds. There's a weird ... city of shadows and broken mirrors and empty gates where everything burns your eyes and your whole body feels like it's turning inside out ... All I remember is, we just ran through, as hard as we could, until we fell out of this mirror into Skyhold, and then it was ... like the gate closed behind us." 

Fenris folded his arms over his chest and glared as Varric spoke. Isabela sauntered to his side and squeezed at his arm a little, giving him a little wink. 

"He's getting to a point any moment now," she narrated in an undervoice that nearly laughed.

"The _point_ is that there weren't any demons. Just because Kitten can get herself tangled up in nasty magic that turns everything upside down doesn't mean she _has_ to," Varric insisted.

"No mage has to," Fenris snarled. "But look where they all end up. Even the best of them--" He turned around, putting his back firmly to the eerie glow of the ancient elven magic behind him, and started to stride off. Then he turned around, walked back up to Isabela, took the wineskin from her hands, and strode off.

"Well, that was rude," Isabela sighed a little behind him.

"She'll want to help, you know," Varric said. "She'll want to come. She'll be upset that we've done so much already without her."

"The dear little kitten always wants to help, Varric," Isabela said. "Doesn't mean Fenris is wrong about what may happen when she does."

Fenris thought sourly, _hah_ , and walked on, out onto the ramparts, to get raging drunk under the waking stars. It hadn't helped last time, or the time before that, but you never knew; the third time could be the charm. 

***

He was sitting in his clinic, working on a patient. The power hummed through his body, through his fingertips, but no matter what he did, the patient seemed to linger on the verge of death, her life slowly seeping out of her. Her face was a map of burn scars, her throat gurgling with blood and breath.

Each wound that he healed, healed, but as the magic wreathed around the broken body before him on the slab, it was as though it opened new cuts, slicing her to ribbons even as he worked with every ounce of effort he had to keep her alive and whole. 

"Stay," he whispered.

"I'm already gone," she said, and the voice was wrong because it was Hawke's. 

Anders felt hands on his back and turned around in a sudden flare of power, shining like a beacon as the templars fell around him, and he reached out for Hawke. She was sitting on the edge of the wall, her feet dangling over an endless pit of nothingness as her shoulders slumped forward, and then she was falling.

He ran forward, and couldn't catch her before the cliff dropped out from under him. He fell forward into the open sky, the Frostback Mountains beneath Skyhold rushing up to meet him. The snowy rock hurtled towards his head -- until something caught him out of the air, his shoulders gripped in hands like a vise. For a moment his heart hammered wildly despite the fact that all was still, and he could focus on nothing but a feeling of being trapped.

The low boom of the voice behind him seemed to go through him, to resonate in his bones and banish the fear with the cloak of the warm and familiar.

"You always had a talent for guilt, old friend."

The world changed. They sat on a mountainside, boulders wedged out of the snow overlooking a greenish-yellow precipice. The sun glared discoloredly down at them through a cloaking shield of mist. The face Anders was looking at was his own, but shaped in pure light, silver-blue limned in an argent halo. 

"I've earned that, don't you think?" Anders said, almost wryly. 

"Some of it," said Justice. "But I am Justice, and unlike every other spirit of Justice that ever was, I have also become Vengeance. I am the wrong done in the name of right. I am the thirst that cannot be quenched. I am innocent blood spilled because there is no other way to go forward." 

"I'm sorry," Anders said to him softly. "I never wanted to change you. I only wanted to protect the mages. And ... be your friend." 

"You always were," Justice said. The glowing hands took his own and twined their fingers together. "I must exist, Anders. Sin and virtue are meaningless here, but the lessons of your world can continue forever in me."

"Do you want to come back to me?" Anders said, and he was saying, _Please come back. I'm so alone. I don't remember how to be._

"No," Justice said gently, and Anders could hear the echoes in his mind, as though refracting back through a channel between them that otherwise ought to be closed. Justice understood what he was asking, and was making the choice for both of them. It wasn't the first time he'd been the one in the driver's seat, after all. "Enough now," he said. "Always fight for what's right, Anders. For those who can't fight for themselves. That is what I want from you."

"I will," Anders promised.

Justice rested a palm identical to his own against Anders's cheek, and for a brief moment, their foreheads rested together. The spirit who had been inside him said, "What hurt me was your rage. What hurt you was my lack of compassion. This is what I have learned." 

Anders felt his heart hurt too much with all he barely understood that he had lost, and he closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, his face felt wet with all the tears he'd freely shed in his sleep, but he was awake, looking at the ceiling of the little room he was shut up in in Skyhold. His breath shuddered as he exhaled. The last thing that echoed in his head was the voice of Justice speaking to him as spirit to dreamer, gentled almost to a whisper.

"Walk with compassion, my friend."

***

Hawke climbed.

When she awoke after the battle, they were all gone: Anders, the spirits. Everything but the sky and the bright eyes of the nug, watching her from across the snow and combing its whiskers.

"Nothing to say?" she asked it.

The nug blinked at her, and then disappeared.

"Ugggh," Hawke groaned on a long whine, and scooted on her ass across the snow until she found an outcrop of rock to use as leverage. 

So now she climbed. It had taken serious effort to haul her way back to her feet with a body that felt numb and achey in a dozen places.

The mountain stretched before, its pinnacle spearing the endless green sky. The path was familiar; her boots had crunched this snow before. Her breath huffed, puffing little clouds of steam as the chill bit her skin. She wasn't sure but somehow she thought she'd managed to keep the hangover she'd earned being Anders, and that seemed entirely unfair. 

But as the path curved ahead of her, she found that she was making her slow and inexorable way past what she had seen before, until finally she was forging up through untouched snow. Here she found that was slowly climbing a path that seemed to open before her in a winding circle around the mountain towards its peak. 

Then, as she came to the highest point yet, the path opened out before her into a plateau before the final point of the mountain, and a black wedge of bone spoked up through the snow.

Hawke crouched before the wedge of bone, testing its oddly familiar but outsized shape with her fingers, and found that even though it was ancient, dead bone, it was subtly warm. It was also the first edge of a skeletal structure that stretched on ahead of her. She walked on and found that, as she paced beside the bones, she was walking up the gentle curve of a vertebrate tail, until she came to the massive cage of broad splayed ribs. 

The bones were black, warm to the touch, and larger than any high dragon that Hawke had ever seen living. This behemoth was a grandmother of all hellish dragons, or a nightmare image from which all the dragons and darkspawn built hollow echoes. A soft gust of wind blew a random powder of snow through what would have been the dragon's massive body had any flesh lived on these bones. 

She walked past the dark curves of the ribs, following the long stretch of the broken forelimb, its curving talons. 

Seated on the stone crag beside the massive black dragon's skull was a woman, ancient and still, staring out into the green sky with her long fingers curling gently over the head of the dragon that maybe never was. Her hair pulled back into great stylized silver horns, her old body cloaked in sturdy, feathered leather armor in deep purple and scarlet. She looked remote, and ancient, and unspeakably sad. 

Hawke let the breath trickle out of her in a startle.

But her tongue had never failed her yet.

"So," she said. "What's a nice dragon like you doing in a place like this?" 

Her eyes glowing like amber fire in the pale green Fade light, Flemeth looked at her. Very slowly, the old woman smiled.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to teztime and rozzingit for beta-reading and making me write. Check out their fic at http://archiveofourown.org/users/teza/pseuds/teztrash and http://archiveofourown.org/users/Roz/pseuds/Roz <3

Carver Hawke was just about done. 

It had taken weeks to make the overland journey to the Anderfels, weeks of cold, snow, and bad food. It was humiliating to have been separated from his Warden detachment, although a lot of them had started acting weird anyways. The Calling had been gnawing at him, trying to eat at his reason from the inside out. As the youngest of the wardens on the team, he was the most confused by it, particularly since the sense of urgency it impelled seemed so out of place.

When Carver tried to find out what could bring the Calling so strong and so vehement to so many whose time was far from come, the first thing he found was Marian already in it up to her neck. She was working with renegade Wardens, Fereldan ex-patriates, dwarven lyrium miners, and, her favorite, bloody apostates. Warden business was Carver's territory, his problem to solve, not hers. But she had to "save" him, or something, because he was her brother and that made him her problem to solve. It had nearly come to open blows between them for the first time in years. He was pretty sure he could have taken her, too, if it wasn't for the damn dog.

He turned his head to look at him now, his scowl driven deep into his brow. The short coat was still blurred and marked with the whorls of the last coat of war paint he had shown Merrill how to put on the beast. He met Carver's gaze with miserable and intelligent eyes, the eyes of a warrior who knows what defeat is and is still tasting it.

Muzzling a mabari was just ... just _un-Fereldan_. 

"It's all right, boy," he said. He and the dog both knew that he was lying. It was so far from all right. Neither of them should be in this position. 

Months later, not really sure whether she was alive or dead, Carver still wasn't sure how he'd lost that argument and ended up tromping off to the Anderfels. But that was Marian. She always got her damned way.

Maybe not this time, though.

The first letter he'd received was from Varric, and far from his usual style. Bare facts, with a heartrending apology in their simplicity. He couldn't remember the exact words now, only their impact. He'd shredded the letter into tiny fragments and thrown it into the fire somewhere during the tantrum that followed.

When word reached them that the Wardens were exiled and that their new commander, the former renegade Alistair, was leading them back to the Anderfels, Carver was already halfway through Orlais towards the distant shadows of the mountains. Merrill had insisted they follow Hawke's wishes at first, but she relented when the dog spent an entire night howling and dancing around the edges of the campsite, his nose pointed relentlessly back the way they'd come.

Only when Merrill asked, "Do you ... do you think he means she's not dead?" and the mabari knocked her flat and slobbered all over her in his enthusiasm -- only then did the idea really begin to form that there were more important things he should be doing than going to Weisshaupt. Particularly since Alistair and the other Wardens were already headed there, and the Calling had receded from its throbbing ache in the back of his awareness.

Now his aching head had more to do with getting clubbed in the helmet with a really big maul.

It had been a long, long journey, and much of the territory was fraught with hazards. He'd be dead twice over if it wasn't for Merrill, not to mention the war hound. They'd kept off the road as much as possible, slogging through mountain paths, long stretches of frigid rocky terrain, a really memorably disgusting-smelling swamp, everything to avoid the villages that occasionally dotted the wartorn landscape of beleaguered Orlais. Once a belching green rift had spewed so many demons and wraiths and shades at them that they'd only barely escaped with their lives, and Merrill had spent so much of herself saving his ass from the demons he'd been forced to carry her in his arms for miles until he found an old abandoned cabin to use as shelter.

Carver had shed his cloak and the padded Warden's coat he wore and given both to Merrill, but couldn't persuade her to take his extra boots. Her shoeless tread had saved her in the thick of it; he didn't know where she was now. He sat on the back of the cart, missing his sleeves desperately and watching the sealed cuffs in their bite at the skin of his wrists. The chains wound the manacles together and snaked down the length of his lean frame to hook into the pair of matched but larger manacles that bound his ankles. 

He wasn't going anywhere except where this blasted cart took him.

The cart was grinding to a halt with a snort and stamp of the mules that were pulling it. Carver hunkered low against the crates they were hauling along with him and the dog. He had managed to secure a fragment of glass from a sealed bottle of lyrium potion; the blue-coated material was not quite sharp enough to slice through the metal of the manacles, but he _could_ saw through the rope that tied the chains to the cart. 

"It's an ambush!" he could hear one of them shouting. 

"How many of them are there?"

"I can't tell!"

"Shit!"

Carver rammed his shoulder against the wall of the cart and called, "Give me a sword, I'll help you with your bandit problem."

"Fuck off, traitor," snarled one of the guards.

Well, all _right_ then. He went back to sawing at the rope with his broken glass.

Listening to the familiar chaotic music of battle, Carver had cut all the way through it and started to work his way through the leather cords that were binding the mabari. His heart leapt into his throat and froze there when he heard a familiar voice shout: "Ack! Oh, bother!"

Carver closed his eyes and closed his hands over the glass shard. He shifted and resettled, hiding the work he'd done by tipping himself sideways and leaning back into the reeking pile of muscle that was the depressed and unwashed war hound. When the guards returned with their new prisoner, he was still leaning that way, looking sardonic and trying not to show on his face how much he wanted to look panicked instead.

She was bleeding from a cut on her forehead and her arm was hanging in a way that suggested her shoulder had been dislocated. They threw her unceremoniously into the cart, half across Carver. He shifted as rapidly as he could to try and soften her fall, but she was already limp as well as just as filthy as he was. 

They didn't laugh, at least. One of them looked absolutely disgusted as he manacled her ankles. Carver watched him as he worked, and then watched him as he hesitated with the chain wound through his hands, looking across the pale, limp form in a Warden's coat far too large for her slight body.

"Leave her hands," Carver snarled at him. "She's not even an exile, and you've already mangled her bloody arm."

The soldier hesitated a little longer, and then stepped back. "She's wearing a Warden's coat," he pointed out.

"Yeah, because it's _mine_ , you idiot," Carver snapped.

The soldier winced visibly, and then nodded and moved off.

"What are you doing?" said one of the other soldiers as they both headed to the front.

"He's right," Carver heard him say. "We've taken her staff and her dagger, and she's not even conscious. Leave it."

Carver let his head fall back against the mabari, who whined. With his hands manacled before him rather than behind, he managed to reach over and help shift Merrill into a less awkward position across the cart. He set her head gently in his lap and let his eyes fall shut as he stroked through the tangled dark of her hair. It felt a little prickly and unpleasant under his fingers, probably too long since she'd been able to wash or comb, but he didn't care. The touch was for her, when she awoke, but for him too. It was good to remember that he cared about anything other than cracking heads together.

He dozed fitfully for awhile as the cart rattled and bumped over the Orlesian road, and only Merrill's soft whimper on awakening drew his attention.

"You bloody idiot, Merrill," he said lowly as she stirred. "What did you come back for me for? Why didn't you -- go for help, or something?"

"I did," Merrill mumbled. She opened her eyes, huge and dark in the dimness, and peered at him. "Sort of. I used the last of the money to send a message. Owww," she whined a little, shifting and resettling as she tried to use her bad arm to leverage herself up.

"No," Carver said, and used his bound arms to weight her back down. "Easy." His voice as gentle as he could make it, he could still hear that the words he was saying were, "You're hurt, don't be stupid."

Her smile curved her lips as though despite herself, and she smeared her other hand over her face as she looked up at him. "You always say the sweetest things, Carver," she said lightly. "Don't worry, I'm not so very badly hurt. But when I found out these soldiers were returning you to Skyhold, I thought it best to come back for you. I didn't mean to hurt so many of them, even when we fought them before."

"I know," Carver groaned, "you kept apologizing." The mabari whuffed grumpily inside his muzzle as Carver's head whumped back against his side.

"If they'd only listened, there would be more of them left!" Merrill insisted. "It's not going to make things any easier when we get there." 

Carver closed his eyes again. His hands clanked with the shift of his chains. "Nothing will. They're not wrong that I'm an exile. You should have taken off that coat."

"They won't like me better without the coat," Merrill said with matter-of-fact cheer. "Not when I'm calling forth the wrath of the forest on them. El'garnan, Carver, you can be so silly sometimes."

He could feel the smile encroaching on his expression in spite of everything. 

"Damn it, Merrill," he said. "You could have been away free."

"Yes, perhaps I could have, but what for?" This time she did haul herself upright. "If I let you come to Skyhold without me, it won't help Hawke any quicker. Anyway, I wasn't just going to leave you here. You know why I came with you."

"Yeah, yeah, my sister told you to," Carver sighed without opening his eyes.

Her touch on his face was so light he might have imagined it, except when he lifted his gaze again, she was curving her palm against his cheek.

"In part," said Merrill.

***

Anders sat in the library, summoning simple energy over, and over, and over.

Although it was unique in his own experience, and indeed, in Dorian's experience, it was not unique in magical history for an abomination -- "Look, don't make that face, here it is on the page," Dorian said, holding out the book and pointing at the line of text with one clean-nailed fingertip -- to recover from a long possession. There were those who had given up power before, and successfully banished the demon with the help of other mages, blood magic, or contests and duels in the Fade.

"There are even stories that it happened as recently as the last Blight, though there weren't any confirming records that I was able to discover from the annals of Redcliffe," Dorian said. "But essentially, you and Justice were one for so long that your magical ... pathways became blocked. You were yourself a channel to the Fade. Everything you did changed and was shaped by the power inside you. You still have your own power, but you have to ... remember how to use it. Medically the best comparison is someone recovering from a traumatic head injury. Your brain can do it, probably--"

" _Probably,_ " Anders growled.

"Do I look like an expert in magical recovery to you?" Dorian laid a hand across his chest and widened his eyes at him across the table that stood between them. The candles and lamplight gleamed warmly gold across the pages and across the bared curve of Dorian's shoulder. His gear was interwoven practicality and style in a way that Anders could not even remember having had the time and attention to arrange. 

"Only an expert in fashion," Anders told him.

Dorian grinned in a white flash. "I can't tell if you mean that to be a compliment or an insult, so I'll accept it as both. And, of course, true."

Light and shadow flirted with the hollow of Dorian's throat. Anders decided that he just had been alone for far too long. 

"What a bastard," he said, summoning the energy again.

"Don't I wish," Dorian said. He waved a hand and turned a page. "You're clearly recovering. I could even _actually see_ something that time."

"At this rate, I'll be able to light a fire sometime in the next year," Anders said. He was trying not to be glum about it, but he'd gotten very accustomed.

"You might try taking some exercise," Dorian said, glancing over the top of his book at him. He smiled very faintly. "Or blood magic."

"I really hate you," Anders told him.

"I'm really broken up about that." Dorian set down the book and sprang from his chair as he headed across the alcove to run his fingertip along the spines of several more books. 

What happened next could not have surprised Anders more. 

There was a distant scuffling scramble and then a startlingly chaotic noise. Something clicking and pounding up the stone stairs in a riotous echo of movement, like footsteps only somehow more monstrous. Feeling the beginnings of trepidation in his gut, Anders tried to summon more energy in earnest.

"What the--" Dorian began, and that was when the mabari burst out through the doorway, charged down the hall and leapt onto the table like it was charging out of hell and onto a battlefield against all of hell's enemies.

Books and papers flew in every direction. The dog kicked pens and ink, which splattered over its hind legs as well as the papers and the table. One of the books flew so far it actually looked like it might fly over the railing. Dorian lunged to protect it and somehow managed to catch the old leatherbound tome in his arms and clutch it to his chest in visible bibliophilic alarm.

The mabari barked so loud Anders couldn't hear the rest of what Dorian said.

"No!" Anders shouted at it pointlessly. "No! Stop! Bad dog! Maker, you're destroying everything -- ugh, I hate these things..."

With a huge, deep-throated shout, the mabari subjected Anders to the greatest indignity of all: It knocked him out of the chair, flattened him to the ground, and slobbered all over his face in one long, disgusting, slimy lave of tongue.

Then it tore off again across the stone floor, its nails clicking so loud and echoing up into the rookery as the birds flew in all directions, scattering from an oncoming onslaught.

Clutching the book to his chest, Dorian was _cackling_.

From the floor, Anders said, "Ow." 

Several guards ran past them in pursuit of the mabari. As Dorian helped Anders get up off the floor and chortled through dusting him off, Anders saw more of them swarming up the stairs. 

"I have no idea what you did to earn such whole-hearted affection," Dorian said.

"I _hate_ dogs," Anders said, and then stopped. Embarrassed of how long it took him to realize, he looked blank for a moment, and then said, "That was Tiger."

"That was what?" Dorian said.

"Hawke's--" Anders began, and then abandoned the disastrous mess that had been left of his (and Dorian's) studies to head for the stairs.

***

"Now this," Flemeth said, her voice low and warm as she sat enthroned upon her boulder, "I did not expect." 

Standing with her hands at her hips, Hawke tipped her head as she surveyed the seated old woman, and her eyebrows drew up and in quizzically. She said, "Wow, does that happen to you?"

Flemeth's gaze narrowed. Her smile lingered in the edges of the expression, an echo in her weathered skin, otherwise lost but for the glint of her eyes. She said, "Oh, yes," and rose, slow but fluid, from the stone.

"I thought our threads might meet again," Flemeth said, "but I couldn't be sure. Each choice, each change, spins new threads." She stepped away from the enormous resting skeleton, standing with her back to the endless drop beyond her, framed as a figure of deep color against the pale green of the sky. "I was only waiting for ... an opportunity, but what it might be, I couldn't say." 

"Am I an opportunity, then? Lucky me." Hawke crossed her arms over her chest, setting her jaw in the edge of a frown. "You helped me once before and used me as a pack mule, if I recall right."

Flemeth smiled. "Is that all I did?"

"You tell me," Hawke said.

Flemeth studied her. Never comfortable with silence, Hawke shifted a little from foot to foot as she was swept by those golden eyes.

"All right, all right," Hawke gave up after not really that long, "don't tell me." 

"Once we bargained," Flemeth said. "I brought you and your family to Gwaren. You brought a little piece of what I was to Kirkwall. Would you unmake the deal, knowing what you know now?"

"No," Hawke said. She shrugged into more of a slouch, her posture loosening. "I wouldn't. Can you help me again? Can you get me out of here?"

Flemeth looked off into the middle distance. "What power do you think I have?"

"More than I know, old dragon," Hawke answered with a laugh. 

"Perhaps." Flemeth paced across the distance between them on slow, measured steps. She reached out and touched Hawke's face, but her fingers were ghostly, airy edges of light, not a real touch but a shiver of breath and warmth against Hawke's skin. "Would you make the same bargain again?"

 

"Uh, well, I don't really need to get to _Gwaren_ ," Hawke said. "What's ... up with your hand?"

"What you carried before," Flemeth said, "was a fragment. A piece. Enough to restore the whole. I am an echo. A shadow. A glimpse. The knowledge of all I was, though, and I know you know what comes with knowing." She laughed. "So would you make the same bargain again? What comes next: you'll ask for the catch."

Hawke spread her hands. "We both remember this part," she said. "All life's a catch. What about the cost? Last time, the price wasn't anything I couldn't afford. Are you a spirit?"

"The answer to that is somewhere between no and yes," Flemeth said. "But I can give you the way to get out of the Fade ... if you can give me the same. That's it. That's the whole bargain."

"How do I do that?" Hawke said warily.

Looking into Flemeth's golden eyes, she suddenly felt understanding growing in her, like a seed of horror in the depth of a nightmare. She said: "Oh, shit."

Flemeth smiled again. "There you have it," she said. "Only one physical body can get out of here, Champion." 

"All right, but it's _mine_ ," Hawke said. "It's _my_ body." 

Flemeth tilted her head in acknowledgment. She said: "Yes." 

Hawke inhaled a long breath, her brow furrowing as she stared at the old woman, and suddenly she wished that the conversation were _more_ cryptic, because the path that was opening up before her wasn't one she was sure she wanted to know about. 

Knowing she would regret the question, Hawke asked: "So ... what exactly do you want me to do?" 

***

Carver Hawke was brought before the Inquisition in chains.

Fenris watched him from the shadow of a doorway as he was brought out. He looked lean and tall, but underfed, and while the thick dark beard filled out the angular lines of his face and drew more contrast between him and his sister, it was looking distinctly unkempt and in need of a trim. Once he cleaned up a bit, though, he'd look a lot better. The Warden gear he was wearing looked like it had been battered all to hell. There was blood on it, and mud stains, and it looked like a large section of the blue padded material had been deliberately sliced out of it.

He was also glaring at the throne with baleful intensity, but that just made him look more like the Carver Hawke Fenris knew. 

Beside him, Merrill stood. Her arm was in a sling and she stood huge-eyed and ridiculous-looking with her short hair sticking up in all directions. The mabari he'd left them with was nowhere to be seen.

The Inquisitor's general was going down a list of charges that seemed to come down to just how many men the three of them had killed or injured in the process of being brought in.

"--three dead, four more in critical condition, another twenty injured--" Cullen was reading off.

Fenris heard Merrill's high, nervous voice interrupting: "We did try to explain--"

"You will have your chance to speak," the horned giant on the throne said. "Continue, please." 

"--and evidently they set fire to a cart shortly after their arrival in our courtyard," Cullen concluded, rolling up the paper in his hands and turning a sardonic look across the prisoners who stood before them.

Carver stood defiant, shoulders back, head up. 

Merrill wrung her hands a little. "Yes, all right," she said, "that was naughty of us, but really the cart smelled so very bad by then that I don't think anyone was going to use it for anything."

Fenris let his gaze rise, slowly, to the Inquisitor's face. Her features were composed, but he thought he could see the barest gleam of humor in her eyes.

Fenris didn't find Merrill funny. Fenris wanted to bash her head against something when she got really into her sunny innocent harmless little blood mage act. He growled something under his breath with the cross of his arms. Hawke wouldn't thank him for speaking up on the subject now.

"That's our Daisy," he heard Varric say behind him.

"Going to vapidly dither her way out of this mess?" Fenris asked without turning around.

"Not everybody can sensitively brood their way out of messes like you can, Elf." 

"Oh, I'm _sensitively_ brooding now?" Fenris did turn, then, angling a glare at Varric.

Varric smiled. "Shh," he said. "I want to hear how this goes."

Fenris faced front again, shaking his head.

"--anything to say in your own defense, Warden Hawke?" Cullen asked with a particular blandness to his tone.

"It was all a big misunderstanding," Merrill said. "You see, we were coming here anyway, because the dog said that Hawke--"

Carver stopped her by setting a hand lightly atop her uninjured shoulder. He shook his head, and then turned his gaze back to the Inquisitor, his jaw iron hard.

"My sister was ready to die for your Inquisition, serah," Carver said. "I didn't return here because I was a Warden defying your edict. I returned because I'm also a Hawke, and I owe it to her."

There was a remarkable hush that fell over the room in the wake of what Carver said.

Fenris smiled, just a little, and then let his head droop. "She'd be thrilled to hear him admit it," he murmured aside to Varric.

"Overjoyed," Varric agreed, sidling forward past the doorway to set his shoulders against the stone wall beside it.

Inquisitor Adaar rose from her seat upon the throne. She said: "Let him go." 

Merrill cheered and clapped her hands.

Carver looked blank. "Oh," he said. As the guards at his sides unlocked his manacles and began pulling the length of chain through to free him, he said: "I ... didn't really expect that would work."

Adaar said, "The Inquisition is mindful of the debt we owe to the Hawke family. Our efforts to recover your sister are still continuing." She lifted her chin slightly, and Fenris felt for a moment that her gaze was directly on him. "The soldiers you've cost us are not something we will forget, but if you will serve the Inquisition in this, they may be something we can, in time, forgive."

She stepped down from the dais and gripped Carver by the shoulder. She must have said something else as she looked down into his face, but whatever it was, Fenris couldn't catch it; she strode off as the room broke into a stir of noise and rumor.

"Come on," Varric said. "The gang's _almost_ all here. You know Hawke never could resist a party." 

Fenris snorted, but he did follow at Varric's heels. As they reached the others, he could see Anders sidling out of the shadows where he'd been keeping out of the way of the Seeker. He caught his eye and for a moment they frowned at each other, but then the skulking mage came forward into the light.

The smile of open delight on Merrill's face when she saw Fenris was baffling and annoying. She would probably never learn. 

"Merrill," Fenris greeted her. 

Isabela turned up out of the woodwork somewhere -- where _had_ she been keeping herself, anyways? -- and gave Merrill a hug. 

"Kitten! You are foul," Isabela laughed. "Carver, you reek even worse. Hold off, Varric. I am getting these two a bath before one of us passes out from the stench." 

"Oh good, both of us need one! I mean, not -- _both_ of us," Merrill said. She glanced at Carver, and then looked away rapidly.

"You're not still doing that, are you?" Isabela sighed at her, long-sufferingly, and turned an arch look on Carver. "Weren't you keeping my girl warm at night on that long cold road?"

Carver smiled very slightly. He said, "What were you saying about those baths, Isabela?"

There was something about the glint of his eyes that made Fenris think of Hawke, and he was surprised at how much the fleeting glimpse felt sweet, more than it did bitter. He closed his hand into a fist and said quietly: "When you are rested from the road, there is much to explain."

"Or try to," Isabela said with a roll of her eyes. She turned a speculative look over Carver and then grinned. "Good boy!" she said. "Get moving, Kitten. I'm not kidding about the smell."

"Varric said I might be able to help Hawke," Merrill said.

"If anyone can at this point, it's you," Anders said. From the edge of his voice and the flicker of his gaze, it cost him a lot to say it. 

Fenris looked away from the moment's vulnerability in his face, finding it deeply uncomfortable.

"You might," Varric said. "I'll show you what I mean." He glanced at Isabela, and then agreed, reluctantly: "Once you've had a minute. But we'll definitely tell you everything. And I mean everything. Some of this you just won't even believe."

"Where my sister is concerned, I believe just about anything," said Carver.

Fenris sighed. "Varric's not wrong." 

***

"What the hell," Hawke said. "Fuck this place."

This magic was old and simple, and it had been done before, though not in the Fade. In the Fade, the binding together of spirit remnant and body was not entirely unusual, but what formed when spirit and mage joined in the Fade became an abomination: an echo of what this was, or could be. The blend of Anders and Justice to make Vengeance was close, but still wrong, because the passion that drove it ran too high and too hot, and the minds that made up the union were too different.

Once, long ago, a fragment of a mage, a goddess, and a fragment of a queen, a witch, joined together, ghost hands to flesh, and became something else, something more. They wrote the magic into their bones, and with the bones of their magic they reshaped the world. 

"I learned this," whispered Flemeth, "when I was your age."

"I can't believe I'm doing this," Hawke groaned. "What am I getting myself into now?"

Flemeth grinned. "Nothing so terrible," she said. "Although I've received complaints about my sense of humor." 

Hawke said: "Oh. _Great._ "

Stories abounded over history of the Witch of the Wilds and the way she ate her daughters. She swallowed their souls, their selves, and took over their bodies. How else could she ever have remained so young? 

But while Flemeth denied nothing, it became clear, as the old woman's image melted into a simple cloud of brilliant light across the field of snow, that the legend was, as many legends are, incomplete. It was really the kind of thing Varric might make up for Hawke to destroy, wasn't it? A soul-eating old crone hunkered over the ruin of the lives of all her daughters, one by one.

She could take no one unwillingly. Mythal had shown her the magic, and she had taken Mythal into herself. By that act, she was forever changed. But so was Mythal. 

Now the ancient power was gone. The witch was dead, all but this ghostly fragment, this single piece left of what once was, and would never be again. Or could it? 

If she was Mythal once, if she was Flemeth once, what could Hawke might one day become?

When the light faded, Hawke stood alone upon the mountaintop, and the only sense she had of Flemeth was when she closed her eyes. There was the burning glow of a startling purple flame in the back of her awareness, and the sense of a vanished smile, lingering in the freezing air of the Fade.

Knowledge opened up when she sought it, the ancient magic she was promised coming to the tip of her tongue, magic that was so far beyond anything she had learned from her father that for a moment it left her so overwhelmed she could barely summon any power to her fingertips.

"Shit," Hawke said. "Are there takebacks?"

There was no answer. 

"Am I even still me?" Hawke asked next, turning slowly in a circle on the crispness of the snow.

Now Flemeth answered, but her voice was a thought, almost like Hawke was remembering it. It was different from the invasive _everything_ that had been the blend of she and Anders. Flemeth could almost be forgotten, like any other memory, but for the brightness of her hue and the weight of knowledge and certainty she carried.

_Has any choice you've taken left you unchanged? Have any of those changes made you not Hawke?_

"Right," Hawke muttered. The question was the answer. How obnoxious. She shook herself, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes.

She knew what she needed to do next.

She backed a few paces from the edge of the mountain. She said, "Here goes ... everything."

Then Hawke broke into a run and, as the great depths of the abyss yawned before her, she leapt. She didn't hesitate.

And as the stinging cold wind of her fall blasted her face, she regretted nothing as the great breadth of her wings unfurled to catch her.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to teztime and rozzingit for acts of literary midwifery. <3

Otherworldly and strange, the air stretched out around the beat of Hawke's wings. Her eyes took in light in a dozen shades and hues she had never seen before, and she wasn't sure, but it looked as though the orientation of several of the floating platforms of land and broken, ruined buildings seemed to be tilted at strange angles to each other.

_Below_ , whispered a thought in her mind, and she saw it: a shimmering splash of light like quicksilver shifting and rippling under the brilliance of the sun.

She folded her wings and dove.

In the last few seconds before she hit the ground, she pulled herself back and was Hawke again, running headlong on sheer momentum from the last thrust of her wings. She could not have stopped before hitting the tall, silvery mirror if she wanted to. Her body prickled like a thousand tiny needles, or sparks, or spicules of ice, flashed across her skin.

Then she was through and crashing to the floor in a disoriented crumple of limbs. Her staff clattered after her, rolling disregarded over the cool stone. Her arms braced against the floor, her head bowed, and she drew a long breath, eyes squeezing shut.

"Is that _Hawke_?"

The voice wasn't what she was expecting. It sounded like -- Merrill? Hawke barely had time to process any details of her surroundings -- high, vaulted ceiling; ancient carvings; a sense of luxury and of majesty -- before she was abruptly hauled up and crushed in an embrace. She was completely squashed against his chest, his arm a solid bar across her waist, his other arm across her back and gripping her shoulder with force enough to bruise. He was so solid and warm, a pillar of lean strength who only trembled very slightly as he gripped her.

Hawke let it happen. She dropped her head against her brother's shoulder and closed her eyes. If tears leaked past her eyelashes, no one was going to be able to see them anyway.

"I can't even believe," Carver's voice rumbled with edgy snark an inch from her head, "how much you reek, sister." 

But he made no move to pull back. She whacked him across the back and he laughed.

Hawke said, "Okay, what the hell are you doing here?" and then drew her head back and up, squinting around the grand hallway. 

The eluvian stood before them in a reflectionless ripple of ancient magic. Hawke's eye could almost track a pattern in the slithery shimmer across its surface, and some part of her mind recognized it for what it was: the mirror was alive, active and ready, open to the place between worlds. There were other settings, and if she reached beyond language and into memory, she had the power to manipulate them. 

Hawke shook herself and gripped Carver's arm. Merrill stood beside the distracting portal of the mirror with a hand resting on its carved frame, the wide beaming smile on her face so huge and ridiculous it looked likely to split her face in half. "Hawke, I'm so glad," she said. "I knew you weren't dead, but we were all very worried about how to get you back. I never thought to try and connect an eluvian with the Fade! How did you do it?"

On some level sensing the shift of Hawke's mood, Carver's arm tightened across her back and drew her in closer, resting his chin on top of her head. "How did you even get your hair this dirty? Weren't you in the Fade? Is there even any real dirt?"

"I, ah--" Hawke started to try and answer Merrill -- not Carver, he wasn't saying anything worth answering -- and felt her tongue thick and uncertain. How in the hell was she supposed to explain that? To _Merrill_?

Hawke had the sense that, in the back of her mind, a purple spark of power and life was fucking laughing at her.

_Oh, shut up,_ she thought.

_That is the kind of gratitude I have come to expect,_ said Flemeth.

"--It's kind of a long story," she said. "Let's just say I was really sick of the Fade." 

"Did the spirits help you?" asked Merrill.

"Yes," Hawke said, and then, "Ish. Don't make that face, Carver. It wasn't like I did blood magic."

"I didn't make a face!" Carver said.

"That's just his face, Hawke," came the warm purl of another voice from behind them. "It always looks like that."

Hawke pulled away from Carver's grip to turn and see him. "Varric," she said. 

He stood there with his arms crossed, his mouth partly obscured behind his fist as he watched them. His eyes were bright in the glow of the sun slanting through the hall's high windows, wet with unshed tears. His smile grew as he stood there, and Hawke knew that her own echoed it.

"You bastard," she said, and shook off the grip of Carver's hand as she strode forward to meet him. "I can't believe you left me fighting a giant hideous spider thing in the Fade. What the hell kind of ending is that?"

Varric spread his arms and said, "I'll have to do better next time."

His voice cracked a little on the final word, but she didn't give him time to recover before she had basically tackled him. Hugging Varric was hard because Bianca was such a jealous space-eater in her holster at his back. Hawke didn't let her get away with it; she smashed him against her side. For once, he didn't complain about the rattle of his crossbow taking abuse from the pressure of her arms.

"Tell her I'm not kidding about the smell," Carver said from behind them.

Varric simply hugged Hawke back like, for once in his life, he had nothing at all to say. 

"You wait right here," Merrill said. She was suddenly there at Hawke's elbow and reached up touch her arm. "I'm going to go and tell the others. They'll be so excited."

Words boiled up from inside Hawke even as she watched Merrill turn and start to pick up speed down the hallway. "Merrill--" She started to pull away from Varric, to follow her, and was surprised at the coiled strength of her dwarven friend crushing her against him.

"Yes, Hawke?" Merrill turned in a rapid pivot on her heel, turning a bright-eyed look at her.

"I -- I was wrong. About some of it. I just--" Hawke broke off in confusion as Merrill laughed.

"About some of it," Merrill agreed lightly. "I know." And then she vanished around the corner.

***

Fenris had never run so fast in his life. 

Leaving Merrill's wide smile behind in his dust, he bolted down the stairs without a care to dignity, catching a hand to the railing and sailing over the last few steps as he dashed in a sharp turn around the corner. He narrowly missed colliding with several people whose knot of conversation was creating a clear hazard in the passageway and charged through without bothering to waste breath on them.

His feet skidded on the stone as he tried to bring himself up short, his hand slapping into the stone wall. His breath caught as the hallway opened before him.

The Hawkes were arguing. Her back was to him, her arm raised in the wide sweep of a gesticulation. "--waste of all that effort trying to save your neck!"

"You can't stand there and tell me you would have done any different if ... I--" Carver lost the thread of the words in the midst of answering her, and a faint, odd smile hooked his mouth as he met Fenris's gaze past her head. He lifted his hand and spun a single finger in a slow circle.

"What?" Hawke demanded in a snap of high aggravation.

Carver reached out, took her by the arm and turned her. As she moved, her eye caught on Fenris, and the fierce scowl on her face melted in an instant, washed away by open delight.

"Fenris!"

The joy in her voice as she called out to him made him wonder how he could have ever regretted the name. 

Fenris pushed off from the wall and started toward her, but she was already moving, flying to his arms. She brought the force of new momentum as she flung herself into him, bearing him backwards against the stone. Her hands gripped his shoulder and his hip through the curving plate of his armor. Her lean strength was solid and real under his hands. His back scraped against the stone wall, and he lost some breath to the force of the impact, his lips parting in a helpless smile. "Hawke--" He pushed forward into her, tangling his fingers in the tousled mess of her hair. He framed her face in the curve of his palm, claiming her mouth in a kiss of desperate greed. 

Her every touch seemed to draw him in: the heat of her fingers in their pressure at the back of his neck, the urgent hunger of her mouth, the demand of her thigh between his legs: _more_ , her body demanded, as well as _now_ , on top of _mine_. When their kiss broke apart it was because he needed air. 

Fenris leaned his forehead against Hawke's. Their breath mingled in heady closeness as he delicately mapped the line of her jaw and cheekbone in the glide of his fingertips. He drank her in with his eyes as she drew her arms with firm and solid strength around the hard edges of his armor. She pressed into him, molding their bodies together to fit as close as puzzle pieces. He had never wished more for magic, for all its ruin and destruction and chaos -- magic to blink their armor away and spirit them away to privacy.

"This is a ... significant improvement," he said lowly, his smile lifting his mouth irrepressibly at the corners for all his attempt to control it, "on the last time we talked." 

Hawke grinned. She lifted her head to press a second kiss to his forehead, and laughed into his hair in a warm rush of breath. "Are you telling me you wouldn't have gotten used to it? C'mon. You can tell me." 

Fenris growled, but his heart wasn't in it. He nuzzled at her cheek, nosing along to her ear, where he murmured, "Never do that to me again." 

"Can I turn around yet?" Carver asked plaintively.

"Better not," Varric said with a warm chuckle in his voice. "It's getting racy." 

Hawke groaned and dropped her head, burying her face in Fenris's neck. "I'm never letting go of you again." 

"Don't," Fenris whispered, squeezing her tightly in the needy pressure of both his arms. "Don't." 

"That's going to be really inconvenient when she goes for that bath," Carver said.

"You really shouldn't give them any ideas," Varric suggested.

"Ugh," Carver said, and then after a beat he added, " _Augh_ ," and Hawke, still hiding her face against Fenris's skin, started to cackle, her body quivering as the laughter racked her in his arms.

When her laughter was finally spent, Fenris's neck was a little wet from the trickle of her tears, and she seemed to be using him as support to hold herself up as she finally straightened away from him, her eyes overbright. "Maker," she said, " _fuck_ , it's good to be alive."

***

Sunlight glowed brilliantly against the snow of the mountains where Skyhold nested. Hawke walked along the rampart, her hand resting on the massive shoulders of her enormously panting mabari, and watched the soft whorls of snow gusting over the surface of the nearest peak with an idiotic smile on her face.

Nothing looked green. The sky was pale and blue and clear. There were no eerie shades of lost cities or anything of religious import. The world was open and real around her, and though the air was thin and cold, she wasn't starving or thirsty. And it was impossible not to smile as the war hound beside her occasionally broke into little dancing fits of ill-restrained glee merely because she was here.

Dropping to a kneel beside him, she scratched her nails down his back as he danced around, wagging his butt because he didn't have enough tail to wag. "Hey, Tiger," she laughed. "Settle down! It's all right, I'm back now, you big lug."

"You're going to be repeating that a lot," Anders's voice came wryly from behind her. "Variations on a theme, anyway."

Hawke glanced up and over her shoulder at him. "Probably," she said.

His hair looked clean and bright and golden in the sunlight, falling loose around his shoulders. His cheeks and jaw were smoothly shaven. He looked ... healthy. His mouth hooked a little ironically as she surveyed him. "Well?" he said.

"You're right," Hawke said, rising and turning about to face him. Her hands fell to brace at the line of her belt. "I would have gotten to be pretty handsome if I'd stayed in there."

Anders flushed a little. "That -- I mean, that wasn't--"

"I know," Hawke told him. "How are you feeling? You look -- normal."

"I'm not normal." Anders lifted his hand. He focused on his fingers for a moment, and then a longer moment. A dismally thin aura of power flickered awake around his hand and then died. 

She stepped forward and called a barrier to life, flaring blue light around both of them, singing against her skin for a moment before it faded into the general background of her awareness. She reached for his hand and caught it in both of hers, turning it over to study the curve of his palm.

_The seed of power is there,_ she suddenly knew, between Flemeth's voice and her own. 

"You'll get there," Hawke said. "It -- you're still a mage. You haven't lost it."

"Mmm." Anders shook his head. "I haven't. I've lost something. I'm not sure everything I had. You -- I'm not saying you did something wrong. You didn't. I talked to him, afterwards. It's better this way."

"You don't sound like it's better," Hawke said, teeth setting against her lower lip.

"No, well, change is scary." Anders's smile crooked across his lips. It warmed his eyes, and then he looked away from her and pulled his hand back, fingers curling into a loose fist.

"Welcome to the revolution, Anders," Hawke said, settling her weight on her heels.

"No kidding." Anders's smile flashed wider and then faded. He looked out over the world beyond the rampart.

The silence hung between them for a moment. Hawke sidled up beside him, echoing the cross of his arms. They stood there, not saying anything.

Finally Anders said, "I would never have told you. You made it clear, before. Where you stood."

"I know," Hawke answered him quietly.

"And I -- I felt how much you love him," Anders said. "I felt it. It was kind of appalling, actually. I was a little appalled."

Hawke laughed and lifted her hand to smear over her face, dragging her fingers back through the dark tousle of her hair as she watched the glow of sunlight on the snow. "I know, Anders."

"I'm sorry," Anders said.

"I actually know that too," Hawke said. "I was actually there, in your head, for all of this stuff." She turned, leaning backward into the stone wall of the rampart, and drew a long breath through her nose. "But you don't really need to apologize. I invaded your head. I took over your body. It was weird for both of us. I was kind of hoping we would never have to talk about it ever, ever again."

Anders grinned. "Well, that I know," he said. 

"You know, too--" Hawke started, and she hesitated. There wasn't any point in saying it. 

Anders ducked his head, scrubbing a hand at the back of his neck. "I wasn't asking you for anything," he said. "That's all. You've given me more than enough. Some I didn't know I wanted."

"I accept all forms of gratitude, especially lavish praise." Hawke stepped in, caught him by the shoulder, and swung forward onto her toes. She pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth, on the border of lips and cheek. 

His hands closed on her arms. He looked into her face with wary uncertainty. "Hawke--"

"Just live, Anders," she said. She lifted her hand to his face, and patted the smooth curve of his newly shaven cheek before she withdrew. "You know the rest, right? You don't need Justice to guess." 

"You always were a sucker for hard luck types," Anders said, eyebrows lifting and then dropping with a slight, wry smile on his mouth.

"It's my tragic weakness." Hawke shrugged away from him and caught one of his hands. She held it for a moment, studying his features, trying to figure out how to explain what she meant without actually having to verbalize anything. She inhaled, squeezed his hand, and dropped her eyes. 

"Make things right, huh?" Anders said.

Hawke's smile felt eerily doubled, as though someone were sharing the expression with her. She said, "Anything we can." Letting go of his hand, she shook her head slightly and then took a step back.

She almost tripped over the dog. Snorting a little in sudden self-consciousness, she turned her attention to Tiger and ran the nails of both her hands down his back as he let his tongue loll past his monstrous jaw. "Come on, big fella," she said to him. "Let's go back inside. I need a bath."

The mabari yelled a single, sharp bark.

"Wash your awful dog, too," Anders called after her.

Hawke laughed as she walked away from him.

***

Skyhold was all in an uproar as the Inquisitor set her people to organizing festivities for the evening. Lady Montilyet escorted Hawke to the Inquisitor's own quarters to set her up with the massive bathtub. Hawke was vaguely boggled at its size, but then, it made a certain amount of sense. A heated stone tub large enough to regularly fit a Qunari giant would have to be palatially huge. 

She stripped off her gear and left it in a haphazard pile on the floor, breathing in the steam rising from the water. 

The bath was so hot as Hawke slid into it that it flushed her skin rosy. She whimpered as she sank into the water. She submerged herself, letting it soak into every pore and crevice, and held her breath as she closed her eyes beneath the surface. She rubbed at her scalp with her fingertips until she felt herself running out of air and broke the surface again.

All was quiet. She settled herself against the heated stone of the tub and looked blankly around the room, only just realizing that she had forgotten to locate the soap before climbing into the water.

"Well," she said aloud, "that's the worst thing that's happened today," and then she threw back her head and laughed.

She was just contemplating how much effort it would be to haul her naked body back out of the stone tub and drip all over the Inquisitor's floor when there was the creaking sound of hinges. 

Hawke wondered idly if she was about to encounter a disturbed and/or sarcastic Qunari who hadn't been consulted about this bathroom theft, but instead she was greeted by a much more welcome sight. The dusky sunlight of the fading evening lit Fenris's silver hair and tattooed skin as he slipped on quiet feet across the stone floor. 

"Isabela said you were in here," he said.

"Come on in," Hawke said, lifting her arms high and wide in the air. "The water's fine." 

"Catch," Fenris suggested, and tossed an object at her underhand. 

She caught it. It was a soft, crumbly Orlesian soap, smelling of spice and citrus. 

"I can't believe you're not offering to scrub my back," Hawke said.

"I just got here," Fenris pointed out lightly as he started to unbuckle the straps of his spiky dark armor.

"Ooh, all right, give me a show, that's good, too." Hawke pushed forward on her knees in the stone tub, folding her arms loosely against its curved edge. She leered at him happily.

Fenris murmured, "Naughty." He ducked his head a little, pretending he wasn't flustered at all by the intent and deliberate focus of her attention as he wriggled out of his armor.

"I love watching you," Hawke chortled.

"I love listening to you," Fenris said, "particularly when you think you're funny." 

"All the time, then!" Hawke said. "And what do you mean, _think_ I'm funny? I'm hilarious."

"Mmhmm." Fenris skimmed out of the rest of his armor and stood before her for a moment, his bare feet planted wide. The slight turn of his heel, the way his hands fell flat to his sides, revealed his self-consciousness in his sunlit nudity, like he wasn't sure what to do with himself. The lyrium tattoos didn't quite glow, but they still struck a striking contrast in their bright lattice over his dark skin and cleanly sculpted muscle. It was amazing how still and controlled he could be, so proud and composed and simultaneously so easy to fluster. He asked, "Good enough show?"

"You could flaunt your hips a little," suggested Hawke.

"You are impossible." Fenris folded his arms over his chest.

"Would you _come here_ already? I'm dying over here." 

Fenris smiled and ducked his head. Then he came over, lightly scaling the side of the tub. His breath caught at the bright blaze of heat against his skin.

"Nice, right?" Hawke grinned at him.

"It is," Fenris murmured. "I understand there is a dwarven artificer responsible for the heating element and the tub may be about to explode at any moment."

"You're kidding." Hawke widened her eyes at him over her shoulder, even as she wriggled her shoulders coaxingly.

"As you know, I am full of jokes." Fenris reached to take the crumbly soap from her and began scrubbing over her back, shoulders, and neck. He worked a lather of soap over her skin, building foam between his hands, and then worked his soapy fingers through her hair, massaging her scalp. She groaned in exaggerated encouragement as she slumped forward on her elbows against the stone curve of the tub. 

"You have no idea how amazing you are," Hawke mumbled.

"If you don't get back here, you'll get suds all over the floor," Fenris said.

He drew her back, and she leaned into him. He cupped water in his hands and poured it over her skin. She felt it sluicing away layers of dirt; she imagined spent magic and tension and fear gliding away with it. She let herself settle against him in the warm water, resting in the loop of one of his arms as the soapy foam soaked into her scalp. 

She closed her eyes, tilting her head against his in a way that risked getting suds all over him. His hands slid in long strokes over her body as he nosed against her ear.

"Mmmm," Hawke told him without opening her eyes. "I can't decide if I want to make love to you or go to sleep on you." 

"Well," Fenris murmured back philosophically, "one of those bears considerably less risk of drowning."

She cackled. "Well," she said, opening her eyes. She turned, sliding across him in a slick glide of skin, and pressed her pebbling nipples against his chest. Her mouth hooking in a faint smirk, she said: "I'm convinced." 

It was slow, languid, and wet. She slid across and atop him in the warm water, mapping his tattoos with her fingers. She breathed against the hollow of his throat, licking the drip of sweat from his skin. He slid his hands up and down her back, curving at her ass. He nipped at her skin, biting lightly along the edge of her collarbone, nuzzling and suckling at her breasts. A few times, she got soap in her mouth, and he laughed so whole-heartedly at the disgusted noises she made that she made more of them.

When they were finally finished, she glowed with warmth inside and out, buzzing with a thoroughly pleasant exhaustion as she curled against him in the warm water under the possessive weight of his arm. 

The sunlight through the window turned pink, then purple, and then faded into a quiet twilight. She was definitely turning into a prune. "We're totally going to be late to this party. Isabela is going to kill me."

"Let her try."

"I'm getting up." Hawke finally pulled away from him, water sluicing from her naked skin as she stepped out of the tub. She dripped her way to the robe hanging from the hook and tried to shrug into it. It was enormous. She drowned in warm folds of cloth. The sleeves dipped past her arms.

Hawke said, "Oops," and then started to laugh.

Fenris followed her, the fading light gleaming from his skin as rivulets danced over the lines and angles of his body. He reached for the robe and blithely shrugged one of his arms into the other sleeve, until they were both imperfectly folded into the giant Qunari bathrobe.

Fenris grinned and leaned in close to her as she laughed and leaned against him. He kissed her lightly, and then said: "I think we'd better find some clothes that fit."

Hawke said, "No, we should go to the party _just like this_."

But because he was _totally_ a spoilsport, she wasn't able to convince him.

***

The sun was sinking in the west as color in a dozen startling hues reflected from the snow. Anders leaned on his arms against the edge of the rampart and watched, his breath trickling slowly past the purse of his lips.

"So. It is done." 

Cassandra stood behind him in her full armor, composed and serious. Her blade was naked in her hand, though her shield was lowered with the angle of her arm; she was relaxed, rather than on guard, and still could have killed him in a heartbeat.

Anders turned to face her. He felt instinctively for magic to use in his own defense and felt as though everything he knew was out of reach.

"Seeker," he said.

"You've done what you came to do, apostate." Cassandra raised an eyebrow at him. "I have stayed my hand so that you could work this ... minor miracle. You've brought Hawke back to us, or she brought herself." Her smile was a faint hook at the corner of her mouth, and it faded quickly. "That doesn't make you less a murderer and a terrorist." 

"You know my situation has changed," Anders said carefully.

"I know your actions remain your own, and always were. Do you deny it?" Cassandra's eyes widened as she stared at across the brief distance between them. Her blade, in her hand, leapt to point directly at the line of his throat.

Anders was fascinated by the sword, mesmerized by her perfect control. It was so still in her grip, pointed steadily at the center of his throat. His death stood silent and waiting for him to answer, her eyes blazing with intensity, her mouth a hard, even line. There was no one here to rescue him now.

"I don't," he said. "But what if I want to make amends?" 

"You think amends can be yet made?" Cassandra's question was as swift and harsh as a whip's crack.

"I don't know," he admitted. His hands lifted to either side, palms up. He felt strangely unafraid. Clarity seemed to slice through months of fugue. He was going to die. Now. Today. Or later; but either way, his path was certain and mortal, as it always had been. 

"Then turn yourself in, and throw yourself to the mercy of the Chantry. Divine Victoria may give you the chance." Cassandra's weapon did not move. 

"You don't believe she would," Anders said.

"I would not," Cassandra said. 

After another long moment still, the Seeker lowered her weapon, and, to his amazement, slid it into its sheath at her back. 

"You can end your flight, mage. You do not have to run forever." 

"Why--?" Anders started to ask.

"The Inquisitor and the Champion have asked me to stay my blade for tonight," Cassandra said. "You have the chance to go, yourself, to the Divine, and ask for mercy. If you do not, I will follow you to the ends of Thedas and I will _personally_ bring you to justice." 

She turned on the heel of her heavy metal boot and said, without looking back at him, "You will not get another chance to make the right decision." 

Then Cassandra walked away. 

He stared after her, and then looked back out into the dusk. 

***

The main hall of Skyhold was gilded with the light of hundreds of candles. The musicians were more brightly lit than the rest of the hall, lanterns supplementing the glow of the fireplaces and the candlelight, and they played a sprightly, joyful tune. Staff circulated with food on trays. In deference to either the preferences of the host or the Fereldan roots of the guest of honor, it was mostly simple food rather than the height of Orlesian fashion.

Since the Inquisition's chief diplomat was currently twirling around the dance floor with Inquisitor Adaar for the third dance in a row, it seemed that there probably weren't a lot of complaints, or if there were, no one was around who would listen to them.

Hawke sat enthroned, more or less, at the center of a long banquet table in the candlelight. Fenris sat beside her on one side, Isabela on the other. An elf woman with short hair glowing gold-bright by the candles' flame sat next to Isabela and stared grimly at her cards as Isabela toyed a fingertip lightly over the back of her hand. 

"It's your bet, Buttercup," Varric said from across the table, taking a pull from his spiced wine. 

"Ffft. Sorry. Somebody's gettin' frigging handsy," the elf said. She flipped a coin out into the pot. "Raise 'em. Put up or shut up."

"Ooh, spicy." Isabela laughed and laid out her cards before her. "Three ladies. My favorite." She winked.

"Ugh. No way! You set that up!" Sera laughed, too. "Pretty line, though. I like that."

"You don't want to know what happened to the last person who accused the Rivaini of cheating at cards," Varric said.

"Are you sure?" asked the Iron Bull, on his right. He looked extremely amused.

"Time for another drink?" Isabela fluffed Sera's hair and got her hand swatted for her trouble.

"Oh, get off," Sera said, rolling her eyes.

"You first," Isabela suggested with a merry leer.

"Watching her work is kind of amazing, isn't it?" Hawke asided to Fenris.

"She's one of a kind," Fenris answered her.

"Are we playing another hand or what?" The Iron Bull knocked against the table lightly with one fist.

"Dealer's choice." Varric reached across the table to pull the cards back together and stack them for another hand. 

"I think I missed something again. Did I miss something? Was something dirty?" Merrill asked Varric.

"Ask Carver, Daisy." Varric started flicking the cards across the table to each of them in turn as all the players anted up. 

"Oh, bother. I must have." Merrill sighed. She rolled a look to Carver beside her.

Carver smiled sardonically and scrubbed his hand over his beard. "I'll explain later," he said.

"I'm so proud of you," Isabela told Carver.

He lifted his drink to her.

The cards were uniquely kind to Isabela again for two more hands. Hawke stopped betting after that, and the music and food and wine spun on and on. The night was velvet black beyond the windows, but inside the candles melted slowly down to blazing puddles of wax. 

As the candles burned down, Fenris retreated to a glowing kind of quiet. Carver and the Iron Bull went three rounds of arm wrestling (which Carver did not even come close to winning). Merrill went and danced lightly through the crowd of dancers, free-wheeling without a partner. Somehow, Sera ended up playing a hand of cards from Isabela's lap. (Varric won that last hand. Hawke supposed it was harder to cheat with a lap full of blonde.)

Hawke watched them all, suffused with a contentment that was as close to perfect as anything she could remember in a long while.

"So, Chuckles. I've been waiting for this story." Varric slid the cards across the table for Hawke to cut.

She cut the cards. Arching her eyebrows, she said: "That's your department, Varric."

"You've got to give me something to work with here," Varric said, smiling up at her. "We're all dying to know."

Hawke hesitated, and then flashed a sudden smile, warm with wine and the verge of laughter. "Okay, Varric," she said. "Why don't you get me started?"

Varric considered, tilted his head, and then reached for a pitcher to get more to drink. He took a long pull, licked his lips, and smiled. Spreading an open-palmed hand, he began for her: "So no shit. There she was. In the Fade. Facing the monstrous nightmare."

"No shit," Hawke agreed. She leaned forward, elbows on the table, and gestured in an open-handed echo of Varric. "There I was. . ."


	18. Epilogue (1)

The clustered clouds made it hard to tell the moment when predawn melted into the beginning of the day. The light was grey and pale, falling wan across a color-bleached mountainscape. Anders's boots crunched into snow and gravel. Snow had fallen overnight, and most of Skyhold would be too hungover this morning to notice he was gone, most likely.

The air was cold and clear. Each breath tasted gloriously new. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt like this. The day was dreary and grey and beautiful. Hawke was alive and his universe was all possibilities. 

The Seeker had not made clear just how long his truce would last, but he suspected it would not be long past daybreak. Anders thought he might be safe, while Hawke lazed under the ancient stone roof, but he knew not to outstay his tenuous welcome. For one thing, watching her there was damned hard. Knowing she was alive, remembering the gentle heat of her kiss on his skin: that was enough.

Enough now. 

The real question was where his feet would take him once he finished his descent from the Frostbacks down into Fereldan. He was far from the Free Marches now, where his revolution had begun. The new tide of news from the Chantry and the iron grip of the new Divine Victoria suggested great things for the mages. As little as Anders trusted news from the Chantry, the whispers of the Red Divine were almost ... _almost_ promising.

In the meantime, Thedas had been racked by war. 

There would be plenty to do.

His staff bit the snow underfoot as he paced on down the road, heading south and west. As he mused on where to go first, another question rose: what he could accomplish, what should he accomplish. His powers weren't gone, he knew that Hawke and Dorian weren't wrong about that; he sensed his magic in his bones. But even when he was a boy and learning, it had never felt so hard to reach.

"I had a gift like that once, but all I wanted was to make it go away," said a voice by his ear. 

Anders startled and leapt to the side, bringing up his staff. Even though his magic was weak as an atrophied muscle, he could still use the staff to hit things. But he found that he was facing the long, lean frame of a familiar youth in his ridiculous hat and he relaxed.

"Cole," he said.

"Hello," Cole said, and smiled. "I could feel you, follow you, fight with you. You want to help, so do I. It's not safe for you on the road alone, you know."

"I can take care of myself," Anders said, even though it wasn't entirely true. He could hide pretty well, but there were a lot of ways to die in the wild by yourself. 

Cole tilted his head. "You can say no," he said. "I could hear you helping, spirit lost, spirit watching. I'm human now, more Cole than not, but I can help, too." 

Anders hesitated for a long moment. "I was expecting to be alone," he said. "I've gotten used to it." He thought of the voice of Justice, booming through him in his dreams, and smiled just a little. _Walk with compassion._

"You don't have to," Cole said. 

"I guess you're right." Anders looked across the snow between them, and then looked up toward the pale face, shaded by the broad brim of the hat.

He held out his hand.

Cole's smile curved his lips, warm and bright despite his hat obscuring his eyes. Their hands met in a brief clasp. Anders was expecting something chilly to match the boy's pale and elusive seeming, but his skin was warm with an almost febrile heat. He was altogether alive.

Well, good. Anders was, too. 

"All right," he said, raising his eyebrows at the boy beside him. "Let's go." 

They walked together onward into the pale light of morning. Behind them, the snow began to fall.


	19. Epilogue (2)

Hawke slept deep and dreamlessly that night, and woke with extreme reluctance, tangled up in soft sheets and the lean limbs of her elven lover.

It had been a long while since Flemeth had really embraced the pleasures of a living body. Sex was a pastime of the young and love a pastime of the foolish. She had drunk deep from the well of trust once, maybe twice, and found its aftertaste altogether too bitter for her liking, particularly in the aftermath of her recent murder.

But the glow through her skin now reminded her of why one might bother.

Fenris began with the soles of her feet, digging hard with his thumbs before moving them in slow circles to massage any lingering tension out of them. Her toes curled, her back arching as she wriggled into the pillows. Her breath lost to a cackle, Hawke said, "Good morning to you, too."

"Good morning," Fenris murmured in a low purl of warmth, and leaned forward to brush his lips against her knee. 

Flemeth felt Hawke's lithe young body shiver with waking response as Fenris worked his hands up her calves, stroking the smooth skin, the faint prickle of tiny dark hairs electric under his palms. 

It was an old game, and Flemeth could teach them both a trick or two. 

Sometimes Flemeth could not even remember all the lovers she had had. The list of loves, of course, was much shorter. The need that twisted Hawke's hands in the soft silver hair and made soft murmurs of encouragement as he nosed inside her thighs ran deeper than simple physicality.

The list of lovers and loves that had never betrayed her shrank so far as to be a nullity. Even her most ancient friend had slid the blade home in the end. For the greater good, of course. The old wolf was a master of self-deception. 

Flemeth remembered another time, so very long ago, so many bodies ago. 

Now, as Hawke's back arched across the silken threads of the sheet, Flemeth remembered the coolness of the springy grass under her bare back, sun-baked stone warm under her feet. 

Now, as the silver-crowned young wolf knelt before Hawke to worship her with lips and tongue and teeth between her thighs, Flemeth remembered another such supplicant.

She stole some of Hawke's smile for herself. 

She remembered the smooth crown of his skull and the gleam of amber-golden eyes, and the sour joke of being worshipped as a goddess when neither of them wanted the heady power of deification for its own sake. 

The old wolf was better at this, Flemeth reflected as Hawke shifted and twisted under the varying rhythm of Fenris's mouth. 

But then, the young wolf had time yet to learn. And he certainly did not lack for enthusiasm. 

She remembered holding both his hands as they knelt in the grass, breathing in the sweetness of its bruised scent. She remembered leaning into him, crown to crown, ages ago on that idyllic morning.

She remembered sharing breath with him one last time before, with choking grief in his eyes, her oldest friend stabbed her through the heart.

The complete trust and safety of this moment lodged in Hawke's young heart made Flemeth sigh. As the young woman threw back her head for a broken moan, Flemeth envied her her innocence. Hawke thought herself a cynic; Flemeth thought she was adorable.

The young wolf's eyes glowed large and green with devotion as he kissed his way up her trembling belly. His smile shaded slyly across his lips. Hawke laughed, drunk on lazy delight, and hauled on his arms to bring him up more quickly and flip him onto his back. 

"We are just getting started," Hawke said to Fenris, as the golden daylight streamed across their naked bodies through the window.

Perhaps there was one way that history would not repeat itself.

Flemeth did not have much optimism left for this bitter old world, but she knew that to abandon hope entirely was to abandon life itself, and here she still was, even after all of these damned fool years.

So ... _perhaps_.


End file.
